Waymo Charges Overnight, Santa Monica Wakes Up

A judge in Santa Monica just ordered Waymo to stop charging its autonomous vehicles overnight, after residents filed noise complaints about the humming and beeping of charging stations running in residential neighborhoods at 2 a.

The ruling, issued in early 2024, is modest and local—it feels like a small correction to an operational schedule. What it actually reveals is that autonomous vehicle companies have learned the playbook of ride-hailing so thoroughly they're executing it in real time. We're about to watch the same regulatory failure happen again with perfect clarity.

Uber and Lyft were permitted to operate in most major U. S. cities starting in 2014 with almost no pre-deployment infrastructure agreements. There were no rules about where drivers could wait for pickups, no caps on the density of active vehicles, no mandatory off-peak parking zones, no agreements about surge pricing's load on neighborhood streets.

Cities scrambled to write those rules between 2016 and 2018, after residents complained about congestion and after traffic patterns had already rewritten themselves. The business model had calcified into the built environment. By the time regulation arrived, the infrastructure was already live and the company's revenue depended on maintaining it.

Waymo deployed in Santa Monica with no pre-agreed charging infrastructure policy—the company planned its own schedule and residents experienced it as a problem. Then the city had to regulate backward. This is not a glitch in how deployment works. This is the model. The company moves first into the regulatory void. The void gets filled only after external costs have been externalized onto the neighborhood and absorbed into daily life. The difference this time is that the cost is visible and concrete and happens at night when people notice it. Ride-hailing's costs were diffuse and temporal—a few extra blocks of circling traffic, a parking spot consumed, congestion spread across hours.