Police in a Silicon Valley suburb were flummoxed last weekend after pulling over a self-driving Waymo robo-taxi for making an illegal turn, then finding no driver they could issue with a ticket.
The incident happened in San Bruno, where cops set up a checkpoint to catch intoxicated drivers. As cars lined up, one vehicle, a self-driving Waymo, pulled an illegal U-turn and began to drive away.
The cops fired up their lights and the Waymo pulled over automatically as the robo-cab operator trains its cars to do. But the police officers who pursued the robo-taxi couldn't hand out a ticket, since the driverless taxi had nobody inside.
"Since there was no human driver, a ticket couldn’t be issued (our citation books don’t have a box for 'robot')," said the San Bruno Police Department on its Fa