Workers at Waymo's SF depots are discovering what happens when you give a city full of weekend warriors an unsupervised vehicle with no driver to judge them. One depot worker, who's been on the job for two months, paints a vivid picture: vomit inside and outside the cars every single weekend, abandoned alcohol bottles and cans littering the back seats, forgotten phones piling up — and, in one memorable instance, a bag of human feces left behind like some kind of protest art.

"I've been working at Waymo's depots for 2 months now and never rode a Waymo yet," the worker shared. "I'm a little traumatized from the stuff I see."

Honestly? Hard to blame them.

This is what happens when you remove the one thing keeping passengers marginally civilized: another human being in the car. Say what you will about your Uber driver's aux cord choices, but their mere presence kept most riders from treating the vehicle like a portable dive bar bathroom.

The bigger question here isn't really about passenger hygiene — it's about costs. Somebody has to clean those cars. Somebody has to process those lost-and-found phones. Somebody has to deal with that bag of poop. And those labor costs get baked into a service that's already burning through investor cash at an impressive clip.

Waymo's promise was always that removing the driver would make rides cheaper and safer. But if you have to employ an army of hazmat-adjacent cleaning crews every weekend, are you really saving money, or just shifting the labor from the driver's seat to the mop bucket?

San Francisco's robot taxi future is here. It just smells a lot worse than the brochure suggested.