I propose we call this practice "unicorning".

Extremely based.

Waymo was less enthusiastic about the practice. A spokesperson said that the cone protest reflects a lack of understanding of how autonomous vehicles work and is "vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways." Waymo says it will call the police on anyone caught interfering with its fleet of robotaxis.

You can tell the cops work for capital because Uber has made a fortune operating illegal taxis throughout the entire country and cops have never done a goddamn thing about it, but put one fucking cone on a car and Waymo feels confident the cops would use violence to stop it from happening again.

If Waymo gets its way, the roads are just going to be fully of buggy, barely-functioning autonomous cars, and every time they hit a pedestrian, the cops will arrest the pedestrian for being "disrespectful."

edit: the more I think about it, the funnier it is. Waymo is supposedly "testing" their technology. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how testing works. If your car can't handle real-world conditions, you don't get to call the cops on the real-world conditions. Putting a cone on the hood of the car is actually a great example of the kinds of weird, one-off things that happen to drivers all the time, often called the "pogo stick" problem. A serious engineering organization would realize that, realize how good humans would be at responding to this anomalous situation, and take it for the humbling experience it should be.

I am totally in favor of doing this for normal cars too considering how many people are killed every year.

BOO! I love using the cruise cars. They have been the most careful with their implementation of the tech out of the companies I’ve seen in SF, only driving passengers at night and slowly increasing their covered area, and riding them is super fun. It’s crazy how Uber drivers and their supporters made fun of taxi drivers as luddites and people standing in the way of progress when they killed the taxi industry, then immediately complain and protest these companies. It’s almost like Taxis cost more because they actually took care of their drivers, then Uber undercut by abusing drivers. Self-driving taxis are clearly the only real path forward for the industry.