Service Businesses with Little or No Staffing; Waymo's Problems Are at the Intersection of the War on Labor Expense and the EV Follies

As I have documented several times, I am not a fan of self-driving cars. I am skeptical that it is possible to fully program the necessary combination of sound recognition, peripheral vision, pattern behavior, human instinct, and intuition that is necessary to safely power a multi-ton machine through uncommon perils.

Google’s Waymo operation seems to be going through a lot of growing pains. Unfortunately, those growing pains are occurring while there are passengers on board but without a person at the wheel.

It’s also becoming evident that a major part of the push for driverless vehicles is related to the War on Labor Expense that has normalized abhorrent business practices to reduce the cost of labor. The good news is that Waymo is not putting off-the-books or slave labor behind the wheel. The bad news is that there is no human involved whatsoever in the operation of its troubled vehicles.

The complete removal of customer-facing employees may save money, but it also results in unstaffed chaos when something goes wrong. For some reason, the self-driving taxi services all seem to use EVs too. Perhaps there is still an aura of gee-whiz futurism about EVs that has appeal, but a vehicle that cannot quickly be refueled seems like a bad choice for a taxi.

Before I discuss the latest round of Waymo problems, it was just two months ago that I wrote a piece about the many recent failures which put Waymo customers in serious peril. These included:

• A Waymo in Austin crossed a double-yellow line to use the oncoming traffic lane as a left-turn lane.

• Also in Austin, a Waymo drove into a flooded roadway, then once it was caught in the water, it stopped rather than drive away.

• A Waymo in Dallas was videotaped slowing at a red light, then just slowly creeping through the intersection, making other cars dodge it.

• A Waymo in San Antonio drove into a flooded roadway, and was then washed away!

July 4th was a very bad day for Waymo, especially in San Francisco, where one self-driving taxi with a passenger aboard drove into and directly over fireworks that were going off. Another Waymo drove into fireworks and the vehicle actually caught fire.

Elsewhere in San Francisco, stalled/bricked/discharged electric Waymos were blocking intersections and causing ire among actual humans who couldn’t get through the intersections. Neither could they talk to a live human driver about removing the abandoned Waymos that were obstructing roads.

“Waymo cars stranded on San Francisco streets as Fourth of July gridlock drains batteries” [NBC]

Dave Guingona told the [TV station] he spent nearly two hours in standstill traffic until a number of Waymo vehicles were cleared from a roadway.

Did I mention that these ridiculous vehicles are EVs?

Several Waymo vehicles had to be towed away after the company said their batteries died while they were stuck in heavy San Francisco traffic amid Fourth of July celebrations.

I also mentioned that there is a serious downside to putting customers in complicated products without having any employees present who can work with those customers to deal with problems that arise.

“We realized people were getting out of their cars, yelling and screaming at these Waymos because there were no drivers,” he said.

A Waymo spokesman blamed his cars’ malfunctioning on “severe traffic congestion”, adding that "Our team is always evaluating ways to strengthen Waymo's resilience in major traffic disruptions."

Human drivers do not freeze up and stop operating in gridlock traffic. We may get mad, but we don’t just abandon our cars in the roadway. Waymo cannot say the same. This is clearly a technology that is not ready to be turned loose on city streets if something as common as traffic congestion causes the cars to just stop working in the middle of already crowded roads. In addition, it took several hours for Waymo to scrape together some actual humans that could assist in removing their vehicles from the road, making it the city’s problem to clear the streets.

It should be noted that Uber, Lyft, and traditional taxicabs did not abandon their vehicles in busy roadways like Waymo did, nor did they drive over exploding fireworks. Cities should rethink whether a company like Waymo that is habitually derelict in its conduct on public roads should be given access to those roads.

Related to this topic of unmanned service businesses:

I recently found myself trapped in a parking garage which had a system failure that caused the entrance and exit arms not to rise despite its scanner being presented a valid passcard. There were several of us trapped, and we all tried our cards, none of which worked on either the exit or the entrance gates. So, we called the posted “If there is a problem” phone number and a gentleman in India answered. He inquired of the problem and then started reading his script for “Gate won’t open.” He asked for the faulty passcard number. We explained that the problem wasn’t a faulty passcard, because there were many passcards among us, none of which worked. He returned to his script, asking for a passcard number. So we gave him one of the numbers. He told us the gate should now open. It didn’t open, which we advised him. So, he hung up on us. We called back and he said “Please hold,” then he hung up again. We called a third time and now the phone just rang without being answered.

Suffice it to say we were quite frustrated, and members of our party now felt justified in taking whatever actions were necessary to remove the barrier creating our false arrest. The arm would not budge as we tried to push it straight up. However, by pushing the arm out and up at the same time, we a few of the guys were able to bend the arm and bypass whatever mechanism was blocking it from being raised. We Those guys left a bent arm that needed to be repaired or replaced by the owner, but there was now clearance for everyone to exit.

That resolution was not ideal, but there was not a better one, since the garage operator did not offer us a human option to escape our entrapment (unless you count an outsourced screen-reader in India who hung up on us when he couldn’t resolve the problem.)

If zero-staffing is the future of customer service, then businesses are going to be dealing with “customer resolutions” they don’t like when there are problems to resolve.

I was at Aldi recently and my steak wouldn’t scan at the self-check register, nor would it recognize the SKU number I typed in. Aldi’s war on labor expense means that it has decided that one lone employee can apparently handle all upfront roles, with his/her primary focus being to serve as the cashier at the sole checkout lane that is staffed. That same person is somehow supposed to check IDs for alcohol purchases at the self-check lines, and also attend to scanning and payment problems at self-check stations. It was clear that I was not going to get assistance for my problem, so in frustration I just left the steak sitting there and I left. I felt bad about it later, not so much because “I’m better than that,” but because I hated to see that steak go to waste. I felt remorse for the cow, not for Aldi.

Other Stuff I’m Writing About

My latest piece at the The American Spectator has been published. “Two Roads to the Same Communism” discusses how Net-Zero climate communism is just as big a threat as DSA-style communism, yet the former is feted while the latter suddenly has people scared.

Democrats also demand that the use of fossil fuels be abolished. Doing so would impoverish people in a way that makes Cuba look prosperous. It would also be a form of mass murder. Before air conditioning, tens of thousands of Americans died from summer heat, especially during the prolonged heat waves of the 1930s. As Energy Secretary Chris Wright noted in a tweet on the morning of July 2, just 9 percent of the energy powering the 13-state Mid-Atlantic region was coming from “renewable” sources. Ninety-one percent was coming from natural gas, coal, and nuclear.

In Europe, there is also a war on farming, because it is a belief of the climate cult that the petroleum used in agriculture, especially to make fertilizer, is destroying the planet. The “intellectual” class pursuing Net Zero in Europe seems to believe that food comes from grocery stores, not farms; therefore, they see no harm in effectively outlawing farming. Nothing that the DSA is proposing is as radical as the climate cultists effectively seeking to abolish food production, yet Democrats in the U.S. stand in solidarity with the European Net Zero agenda. Starvation is a predictable outcome of communism, yet that is on the agenda of the climate crowd.

This piece is not behind a paywall. I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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