A driverless Waymo rolling past barricades and into a busy Colorado farmers market was never going to inspire confidence. Doing it after another Waymo reportedly wandered into a Denver market just weeks earlier has turned an awkward technological mishap into something far more combustible.
The autonomous vehicle entered the South Pearl Street Farmers Market on Sunday morning while vendors were setting up, according to a 9News report. Witnesses described confusion as the car moved through an area meant to be closed to regular traffic, leaving people on foot trying to work out how to stop a vehicle with nobody behind the wheel.
Vendor Sherry Wilkins told 9News the situation quickly became unnerving.
“Oh my God, it was getting very close to us,” she said, adding that she had no idea how to make the vehicle stop.
That lack of a human being to wave down, argue with or simply tell to turn around has become the biggest source of anger surrounding the incident. A human driver can make a terrible decision, but at least everyone nearby understands who is controlling the car.
With Waymo, people were left trying to communicate with a machine that had already apparently ignored the message being delivered by the barricades.
Colorado Residents Are Asking Who These Cars Are Really Helping
The reaction on Reddit was fierce, with some users swapping stories about strange autonomous driving behavior elsewhere in the country. One Phoenix visitor summed up the distrust simply: “I don’t trust these things.”
Others pushed back, arguing autonomous vehicles can ultimately prove safer than human drivers. But the Denver discussion also exposed another frustration bubbling beneath the safety argument.
Why replace local drivers at all?
Commenters pointed out that taxis, rideshares and public transportation already give people alternatives to driving themselves. That matters because Waymo is not merely another car on the road. It represents a future where more passenger journeys can be handed to corporate-owned vehicles without a local driver earning the fare.
For critics, an unpredictable robot rolling into a farmers market makes that trade suddenly look rather less attractive.
The irony is difficult to miss. Farmers markets are built around local vendors, local customers and money circulating through a community. Into that environment came a driverless vehicle that nobody appeared able to reason with, apparently bringing little to the market besides confusion.
Thankfully, this incident ended as an absurd story rather than something worse. Vendors even joked about remembering the summer when Waymos visited two different markets.
But that humor only carries Waymo so far. If autonomous vehicles want public trust, they cannot simply be statistically impressive in controlled datasets or useful when everything works perfectly. They have to behave predictably when streets become messy, temporary and unmistakably human.
Denver’s farmers markets have now offered Waymo that test twice. Locals would probably prefer it stopped coming back for extra credit.
