So this week I watched a self-driving car burn on live television and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: LA has been in open unrest for the last several days over ICE raids, Trump sent in the National Guard against the governor's wishes, and somewhere in the middle of downtown, protesters set fire to a handful of Waymo robotaxis. Not keyed, not spray-painted. Fully torched, windows blown out, sitting there smoldering on live news feeds like some kind of accidental art installation. Waymo pulled its fleet out of the area pretty fast after that, which, yeah, obviously.
I know the internet's first instinct was to make this a referendum on self-driving cars specifically — are they safe, are they a menace, etc. That's not really what got me though. What got me is that nobody drove those cars into that street. Nobody was inside them making a decision to be there. They were just... present. Empty white boxes that happened to be sitting at the exact wrong intersection at the exact wrong moment, and they became the symbol anyway.
There's something almost too on-the-nose about a driverless car getting burned during a protest about who gets to make decisions over people's lives without a human in the loop. I don't think the people lighting the fires were thinking about it in those terms in the moment, honestly. A burning car is a burning car, it makes a great photo, it's satisfying in a primal way that a burning dumpster also is. But the optics writers are going to be chewing on this one for a while. A Waymo doesn't clock out. It doesn't call in sick. It has no opinion about the protest it's idling next to. It's just corporate property that happens to look like a little bit like a cop car if you squint (they're not, I know, don't email me), and apparently that's enough.
I've ridden in Waymos maybe a dozen times now, mostly in Phoenix and San Francisco, and every single time some part of my brain still goes quietly "this is insane" when the wheel turns itself at a four-way stop. It's a genuinely remarkable piece of engineering and I say that as someone who's generally allergic to Silicon Valley hype. But engineering marvels don't get to opt out of being political objects once they're sitting on a public street with a company logo on the door. Waze knew this. Uber knew this, back when their cars were getting keyed in 2018 over labor stuff. Waymo's turn was probably coming regardless of the news cycle that triggered it this week.
The part that's stuck with me the most, honestly, is a small one: apparently insurance claims on these things are a genuine mess because the "driver" is a fleet operator and a sensor suite instead of a person with a policy number, and nobody's fully sorted out what "totaled by arson during civil unrest" even means for a vehicle class that's existed commercially for like three years. I don't have a tidy point to make about that, I just find it funny in a bleak way: we built the car of the future and immediately ran into a paperwork problem nobody anticipated.
Also, unrelated tangent, but I have to say it somewhere: I watched the WWDC keynote earlier this week too and the thing that actually stopped me mid-scroll wasn't the new glassy UI everyone's screenshotting, it was Apple just quietly renaming everything to match the year. iOS 26. macOS 26. Skipping right past 19 like it never happened. I get why, calendar-year naming is cleaner, Microsoft and half the industry already does version-by-year for other stuff. But it still felt like watching a company casually delete a decade and a half of counting because the math finally got embarrassing. Nobody's going to remember this by August. I just wanted it written down somewhere that it happened and it was a little bit funny.
Anyway. Keep an eye on the Waymo thing over the next few weeks — not because the cars matter, but because how fast a company un-launches a service the moment it becomes a liability tells you a lot about how confident they actually were in the first place.