A crowd of people in San Francisco's Chinatown vandalized a self-driving Waymo car and set it ablaze during Lunar New Year celebrations.
The incident occurred at around 9 p.m. on Saturday night on Jackson Street near Grant Avenue.
Videos posted on social media showed a crowd of people gathered around the robotaxi, drawing graffiti on it.
The footage shows that a person used a skateboard to repeatedly bash the front passenger window and the windshield of the Jaguar, causing the glass to shatter.
Someone then thew a lit firework inside the vehicle, setting it ablaze.
The fire was started by 10 to 15 people who surrounded the vehicle, Lieutenant Mario Elias, of the San Francisco Fire Department, told [NEWS].
"Graffiti, broken windows and lighting the interior on fire is what subsequently burned the car to the ground," Elias said.
Firefighters responded just after 9 p.m. and extinguished the blaze in 10 minutes, he said. There were no injuries reported.
The vehicle was not transporting any passengers at the time of the incident.
A street reporter who goes by ________ on [social-media] said: "When I arrived on scene, SFFD (San Francisco Fire Department) was already on scene hosing down the car with water and their chemical extinguishers. The battery appeared to be reigniting multiple times and was smoking like crazy. The live footage I did gives a decent idea to how I came on to scene, which was after the attack on the vehicle. The vehicle looked completely 'decapitated' and I have never seen a vehicle that damaged up close."
Saturday's incident comes days after a cyclist was injured in a collision with a Waymo driverless vehicle.
[NEWS] reported last year about how driverless taxis were being targeted by protesters amid concerns about safety.
Submitted Anonymously Over Email