Ellie Davis
speaker
64 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Aug
Ellie Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In Austin in March, a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance from reaching the scene of a
And so that was a big concern for law enforcement there.
And also the other kind of category of issues that police officers are seeing are Waymos and other robo taxis getting confused in unpredictable circumstances like a construction zone or a big event like a concert or sporting event.
When an autonomous vehicle gets a ticket, it's the company that's responsible for handling the ticket and potentially paying a fine.
For example, in Austin since September 2024, Waymo, as the company, has had to pay $7,433 in fines.
That's according to the municipal court records in Austin.
One example of a surprising traffic violation that police officers saw was a Waymo that was briefly stuck in the middle of an intersection, swerved left and went onto the wrong side of the road to get ahead of traffic.
And eventually, after a block of driving on the wrong side of the road, merged back into the right lane on the right side of the road.
And in this situation, the police officer
wrote a ticket to the company, recorded the license plate, and was able to write a citation.
Other instances that police officers have had to deal with are Waymos getting stuck in kind of dead-end zones or places where they shouldn't be during big events.
I talked to one officer in Austin who...
had to ultimately block Waymo's in with traffic cones because they were getting stuck at the dead end of a road during a graduation event.
They're trained to not run over the cones.
And he kept those vehicles there until Waymo sent out human representatives to drive the cars away because he didn't want to let the cars go and drive away if they were going to keep causing problems during this event.
Most of the law enforcement officers I spoke to acknowledged that in most cases, autonomous vehicles do a better job than regular drivers.
They typically don't speed, they never drive inebriated, and they eliminate a lot of human error.
But at the same time, they're causing sort of their own set of headaches when they encounter any confusing or unpredictable circumstances like emergency scenes and construction zones.
What do the companies that operate robo-taxis have to say about all of this?
So Waymo, which is by far the leading robo-taxi company in America, said that the company's goal is to be a trusted public safety partner and not an additional burden for first responders.
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