I can't imagine this turning out well if there is any social media movement around these cars. It's reminding me of that one robot travelling across the country which ended up getting destroyed by some people.
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.
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?)
