The Wall Street Journal caught onto a list of parking tickets racked up by Waymo cars since 2024. The total is $9,325. It is really a news story; it depends on how the reader sees it. The number is probably less than $400 a month. A guess is that a ticket costs $40 each. That cuts it down to ten a month.
The real question is whether the cars parked themselves. Some have human overseers. So, a human could have made this mistake. Waymo began to map the streets of Austin at the start of 2025. The Google-owned company began to do full-scale tests with Uber in March of that year. From late 2026 to the present, there have been several small accidents. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) tracked some of these. None stopped that testing.
Waymo is in 11 cities, and its test footprint is 1,400 square miles. In terms of test cities, it runs ahead of rival Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction). It is hard to handicap a winner. Completely hands-free operation of these vehicles requires approval from state or local regulators. This could come quickly in some areas, and much more slowly than others. The companies are at the mercy of bureaucrats.
The decision of the Journal to run the articles, particularly in a prominent place, is more ridiculous because Waymo has paid $7,433 of the tickets. That is probably a better track record than that of human drivers.
As 247WallSt has pointed out, Waymo leads Tesla in an important category. “The IIHS finds Waymo’s driverless vehicles involved in 68% fewer crashes per mile than human drivers across four major US cities.”
The hunger for news about autonomous cars is extreme. First, the assumption is that they can replace human drivers completely across many of the world’s cities, and certainly on well-marked highways. One forecast is that the sector could create $457 billion in revenue by 2034. The price of parking tickets should not be a problem then.
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