Santa Monica, California, city officials ordered Waymo to halt charging operations overnight at two facilities in the neighborhood. Residents have complained about self-driving taxis returning to their homes at night to charge, causing constant beeps and noise from the charging equipment. It raises a crucial question: As the range of autonomous vehicles expands, where are they supposed to charge them near their service areas without disturbing local people?
If you live near Broadway and 14th Street in Santa Monica, California, it seems like you haven’t been getting a very restful sleep lately.
This area is also home to two charging hubs for the fast-growing self-driving taxi service Waymo, and is where neighbors have been dealing with nightly disturbances for months. As autonomous vehicles returned home from driving shifts, local residents were exposed to constant beeping from rear sensors, noise from charging equipment, cleaning, traffic congestion, and flashing lights, according to local news reports. Up to 56 autonomous vehicles are reportedly being shipped at the two sites.
But residents achieved a victory over their autonomous neighbor this week. The Santa Monica City Council voted unanimously to order Waymo to halt overnight shipping operations at overseas warehouses. “The City has received numerous complaints from nearby residents regarding the Broadway Yards, particularly that the nightly operations of the Yards disrupt their sleep, peace, quiet, and enjoyment of their homes,” city officials wrote in a letter to the Google-owned audio and video service.
It’s unclear whether Waymo or its charging operator, Virginia-based Volterra, intend to comply.
Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Times reported that neither had planned, saying city officials had misunderstood existing permit rights. “In response to neighbors’ feedback, we have modified our on-site operations, and will continue to seek community input,” Waymo officials told the newspaper without addressing the matter directly.
But with the autonomous vehicle industry about to reach critical mass in 2025, the Santa Monica noise dispute raises a bigger question all these players must answer: Where are all these cars supposed to charge, and how can they do so without disturbing their neighbors?
In theory, the ideal place for dozens — and perhaps eventually hundreds or even thousands — of self-driving vehicles is to park them in some remote warehouse filled with fast DC chargers and away from houses and apartments where their sounds, flashing lights and traffic could disrupt local residents. But the name of any ride-hailing game is minimizing mileage: the distance traveled without any passengers on board, which means no revenue generated.
Then you add the challenges of losing scale. Autonomous vehicles are mostly electric vehicles, so if their charging depots are too far from their service area, they are operating at a disadvantage in terms of overall driving range. (And the same might be true if these were gas-powered cars, when you think about it.) So, the AV industry should want to locate charging locations as close to the cities it serves as possible.
But it is clear that doing so in some residential neighborhoods is not the ideal solution. Not when you hear what Santa Monica residents deal with every night between 11pm and 6am. According to KTLA, local law enforcement was involved with at least one person who “attempted to disrupt operations at the facilities” on several occasions. In other words, people are clearly very angry about this.
Photography: CBS Los Angeles
This isn’t the first time autonomous vehicle operators, and Waymo specifically, have been cited as a public nuisance in one of the many cities they now serve. Last year, residents of San Francisco’s South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood said they were besieged by Waymos honking at each other while trying to park themselves at a parked station — sometimes as early as 4 a.m. More recently, Palo Alto residents have complained about entire Waymo caravans moving through normally quiet residential neighborhoods. In San Francisco’s inner-Richmond neighborhood, neighbors put up signs pleading with people not to call Waymos in the evening, saying their noise had become unbearable.
But extra crowding is one thing. Figuring out where to put AV charging so it doesn’t completely disturb the neighbors is a different kind of challenge. Noise from any public electric vehicle charging site can be annoying to people living nearby. But the nuisance problem associated with Waymo’s charging sites is distinctly different from the typical noise of a single EV charger, since it’s intended to serve dozens (or more) of autonomous vehicles that are meant to be in continuous, around-the-clock service.
Waymo clearly isn’t slowing down its expansion efforts, so this may be an issue that needs a Google-style hack solution sooner rather than later.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
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