EVWire brief: Recent footage uploaded to Reddit shows a Waymo Jaguar I-Pace crashing into another Waymo vehicle in a Phoenix, Arizona, airport parking lot. This incident took place yesterday, on the 30th of July. There were reportedly no passengers involved. Here’s a video from the spot:
We will update this story when we learn more or get an official statement from Waymo.
Opinion:
This is a surprising one.
The source for the video is r/high_pressure_toilet on Reddit, and there’s currently no more details.
We at EVwire are closely tracking the robotaxi rollout of all players worldwide, as we love reporting on the intersection between EV and AV.
That means we root for most players, including Waymo, to scale up and reach a safe level of operations. Well, the latter first, actually.
This is a small bump on the road for Waymo, they'll make some changes and brush the edge case off.
But just pure observation-wise, seeing this covered by absolutely 0 news outlets out there except social media and few sites like benzinga, what do you think we would've seen if these were two Tesla robotaxis?
A question also remains, how such an incident can happen between the two autonomous vehicles — we’ve seen them have a “stand-off” between each other in parking lots in their depots and sometimes on the streets, but that usually leaves them stranded and the teleoperator takes over. The common Waymo operations in the depots and parking lots also imply that LiDAR systems don’t seem to interfere with each other, at least not usually. What caused this edge case?
