They have been slowly expanding service in SF for several years. Tens of thousands of people have taken a ride. Actually, they give more than 10k rides a week, so probably over a hundred thousand people. Scaling up to the whole city (pop: 800k) is not that big of a jump.

It will turn out well once the newness and novelty of messing with them wears off eventually.

People already have gone around putting traffic cones over the car sensors.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/1196487085/anonymous-protesto....

Just as a comparison, the people who did that also do highway protests. There's a video if you'll scroll down a little https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/08/activists-block-san-franci...

I don't agree with this, but gotta hand it to them, the WWE thing is funny and well-done.

Some people will get real mad, but eventually they'll become so commonplace that they'll be accepted in general. Nobody's gonna be smashing up the self-driving cars they see every single day.

i've always felt that a purpose built robotaxi should be a completely round blob without any exterior protrusions, to maximally avoid coning and subway-surfing-style incidents (waymosurfing?)