Who Gets the Ticket When a Robotaxi Breaks the Rules? | Tech Studio #8

4 AM, a parking lot full of empty cars honking at each other. Welcome to the robotaxi era. We give a driverless car a real driving test: how it sees (lidar, radar, cameras), the traffic-cone protest, the police stop with nobody inside, the safety data, the Cruise crash, and the hardest question: who's responsible when nobody is driving? 0:00 4 AM: empty cars honking in a parking lot 0:29 Robotaxis are real now 1:04 The driving test 1:12 Test 1: How it sees (lidar, radar, cameras) 1:58 Test 2: The traffic cone 2:19 Test 3: Pulled over with nobody inside 2:56 Test 4: The safety record (and the Cruise crash) 3:48 Who is responsible when nobody's driving? 4:30 The verdict Sources: CBS News, ABC7 and The Drive on the Waymo honking lot (San Francisco, Aug 2024); TechCrunch and InsideEVs on Waymo's ~500,000 weekly paid rides (Mar 2026); Tesla Robotaxi launch in Austin (June 2025); Baidu Apollo Go ride totals (2025); TechCrunch and NPR on Safe Street Rebel's "Week of Cone" (2023); Phoenix police bodycam and dispatch records (June 19, 2024: "unable to issue citation to computer"); California AB 1777 notices of AV noncompliance (from July 1, 2026); Swiss Re / Waymo claims study (25.3 million miles: -86% property damage, -90% bodily injury claims vs newer human-driven cars); WHO, ~1.19 million road deaths a year; California DMV suspension of Cruise (Oct 2023) and GM's exit from robotaxis (Dec 2024); Gridwise driver-earnings data (late 2025); Transport Policy study on frontline taxi jobs (57-76%); reports of five Waymo vehicles burned in LA (June 8, 2025). The examiner and the car's lines are fiction. Tech Studio: how the engines that move the world actually work. #Robotaxi #Waymo #SelfDriving