Some of Silicon Valley’s top engineers have spent the last decade writing code for driverless cars to expertly manoeuvre the most complex streets in San Francisco.
But, faced with an orange traffic cone deliberately placed on the hood, the cars experience the robotaxi equivalent of a PC screen turning blue: they become paralysed and clog up traffic.
Activists from the anti-car group Safe Street Rebel are not sure who came up with the idea of “coning” — but as soon as they realised how easy it was to bring any of the city’s hundreds of robotaxis to a halt, they filmed the disruption, posted it on the web and encouraged others to do the same. The antics, known as the “week of cone”, are part of a wider backlash against robotaxis in San Francisco, one of the first US cities where such cars are now able to operate around the clock.