Humans can be a frisky bunch, and it wasn’t very long after Tesla Autopilot started letting drivers go hands-free before people decided to post footage of themselves having sex from the driver’s seat. Recently, The San Francisco Standard interviewed multiple people who claimed to have had sex in robotaxis belonging to General Motors’ now-defunct Cruise. “There’s no one to tell you, 'You can’t do that.' It gets to the point where you’re more and more and more comfortable, and if you’re with someone, like a more serious partner, it can escalate to other activities,” one man told SF Standard.

“The interiors of vehicles has been sexualized and appropriated for sex since forever in popular culture. You can see it in movies, you can see it in lyrics, you can see it in photography,” said Alexandros Rouchitsas, a human factors/UX researcher and one of the organizers of a recent workshop, “Love in Traffic,” that brought researchers from academia and industry together in late September in Sweden to consider how design can help the problem.

A growing problem?

One difference between a robotaxi and a human-driven ride is the removal of the social obligation to interact with a human driver. There’s no need to make small talk, and you won’t have to listen to someone’s terrible opinion, which can lead to riders assuming far more privacy than the cameras and ridership terms and conditions provide. That's a lesson that a pair of teens who hired a Waymo, spent their ride getting drunk, and shot gel beads out the windows learned the hard way this summer.

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