SAN FRANCISCO — At Delirium, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, the décor is dark, the drinks are strong, and the emotions are raw. The punk rockers and old-school city natives here look tough, but they are in mourning.
Kit Kat used to bar-hop along the block, slinking into Delirium for company and chin rubs. Everybody knew the bodega cat, affectionately calling him the Mayor of 16th Street. Kit Kat was their “dawg,” the guys hanging out on the corner said.
But shortly before midnight on Oct. 27, the tabby was run over just outside the bar and left for dead. The culprit?
A robot taxi.
Hundreds of animals are killed by human drivers in San Francisco each year. But the death of a single cat, crushed by the back tire of a Waymo self-driving taxi, has infuriated some residents in the Mission who loved Kit Kat — and led to consternation among those who resent how automation has encroached on so many parts of society.
“Waymo? Hell, no. I’m terrified of those things,” said Margarita Lara, a bartender who loved Kit Kat. “There’s so many of them now. They just released them out into our city, and it’s unnecessary.”
Kit Kat’s death has sparked outrage and debate for the past three weeks in San Francisco. A feline shrine quickly emerged. Tempers flared on social media, with some bemoaning the way robot taxis had taken over the city and others wondering why there hadn’t been the same level of concern over the San Francisco pedestrians and pets killed by human drivers over the years.
A city supervisor called for state leaders to give residents local control over self-driving taxis. And, this being San Francisco, there are now rival Kit Kat meme coins inspired by the cat’s demise.
But all of that is noise at Delirium. Kit Kat was loved there. And now he is gone.
“Kit Kat had star quality,” said Lee Ellsworth, wearing a San Francisco 49ers hat and drinking a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
Before Kit Kat’s death made headlines, Waymo was on a roll. The driverless car company owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, fully rolled out its San Francisco taxi service in 2024 and now has a fleet of 1,000 vehicles in the Bay Area. It announced an expansion this month with freeway service down the San Francisco Peninsula and pickups at the airport in San Jose. Waymo expects to serve San Francisco International Airport soon, too.
Reactions to Waymo
Just a couple of years ago, the white Jaguars with whirring cameras on top were considered oddities. Passersby would do double takes when they saw the steering wheel turning with nobody in the driver’s seat.
Waymos are now a top tourist attraction, however. Many women find them a safer choice than relying on an Uber or Lyft driven by a man. So many parents have ordered them for their children that some schools can look like Waymo parking lots.
Grow SF, a moderate political group with ties to the tech industry, found that San Francisco voter support of Waymo had jumped from 44% in September 2023 to 67% this July.
Still, Kit Kat’s death has given new fuel to detractors. They argue that robot taxis steal riders from public transit, eliminate jobs for people, enrich Silicon Valley executives — and are just plain creepy.
Jackie Fielder, a progressive San Francisco supervisor who represents the Mission District, has been among the most vocal critics. She introduced a city resolution after Kit Kat’s death that calls for the state Legislature to let voters decide if driverless cars can operate where they live. (Currently, the state regulates autonomous vehicles in California.)
“A human driver can be held accountable, can hop out, say sorry, can be tracked down by police if it’s a hit-and-run,” Fielder said in an interview. “Here, there is no one to hold accountable.”
Fielder has strong ties to labor unions, including the Teamsters, which has fought for more regulation of autonomous vehicles, largely out of concern for members who could eventually lose their own driving jobs in other sectors.
Fielder has posted videos to social media, showing her walking the streets of the Mission as she discusses Kit Kat.
“We will never forget our sweet Kit Kat,” she says in one of them. “The poor thing … suffered a horrible, horrible, long unaliving.”
(The word “unaliving” is used by some social media users to avoid algorithms that suppress videos using words such as “death.”)
Waymo’s response
Memorials have sprung up at Randa’s Market, where the owner, Mike Zeidan, took in Kit Kat six years ago to catch mice. The cat hung out on the shop’s counter when he wasn’t roaming 16th Street. One neighbor used to bring him slices of salmon every day; another texted a photo of Kit Kat to his mother each morning.
On a tree outside hang photos of the cat and a sketch of him with a halo above his head.
“Save a cat,” the drawing reads. “Don’t ride Waymo!”
Floral bouquets, a stuffed mouse and a Kit Kat candy wrapper round out the memorial.
One tree over is a display of a different sort.
“Waymo killed my toddler’s favorite cat,” a sign reads. “Human drivers killed 42 people last year.” (Actually, according to city data, human drivers killed 43 people in San Francisco last year, including 24 pedestrians, 16 people in cars and three bicyclists. None were killed by Waymos.)
The sign was an attempt to put the cat’s death in context, in a walkable city where pedestrians still face peril. In 2014, the city pledged to end traffic fatalities within 10 years, but last year’s total was one of the highest on record.
The city does not track how many animals are killed by cars each year, but the number is in the hundreds, according to Deb Campbell, a spokesperson for Animal Care and Control in San Francisco.
She said the agency’s cooler last week contained the bodies of 12 cats thought to have been hit by cars in recent weeks. None of them seemed to have prompted media coverage, shrines or meme coins.
Waymo does not dispute that one of its cars killed Kit Kat. The company released a statement saying that when one of its vehicles was picking up passengers, a cat “darted under our vehicle as it was pulling away.”
“We send our deepest sympathies to the cat’s owner and the community who knew and loved him,” Waymo said in a statement.
Waymo is adamant that its cars are much safer than those driven by humans, reporting 91% fewer serious crashes compared to human drivers covering the same number of miles in the same cities. The data was in a company research paper that was peer-reviewed and published in a journal. Waymo also operates full taxi services in Los Angeles and Phoenix and provides rides through a partnership with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, Texas.
Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco has been a big fan. He said earlier this year he would allow Waymo to use Market Street, the city’s central thoroughfare, which for five years had been accessible mainly to pedestrians and public transit vehicles. He also defended the autonomous taxis in an interview Thursday with tech journalist Kara Swisher after she brought up Kit Kat.
“Waymo is incredibly safe,” he said. “It’s safer than you or I getting behind a wheel.”
Kit Kat’s death
Rick Norris, who works at the Roxie Theater in the Mission, said that he liked Waymos and had noticed that they were navigating the city’s tricky streets better and better. But he was concerned after he spoke with several people who had witnessed Kit Kat’s last moments and recounted how they had tried to stop the Waymo when they saw the cat beneath it.
The car just drove away.
It was at that moment that Sheau-Wha Mou, a Delirium bartender and karaoke host, took her cigarette break. She saw people panicking as they stood on the sidewalk. She rushed over and found Kit Kat suffering, with blood streaming from his mouth.
“I knelt down, and I was talking to him,” she recalled. “‘What happened? Are you OK?’”
She said she had used the bar’s sandwich board sign as a stretcher. A stranger then drove her and Kit Kat to a nearby emergency animal clinic. Zeidan, the bodega owner, arrived soon after.
An hour later, the veterinarian told Zeidan that Kit Kat was dead.
Photos of Kit Kat still sit next to the cash register at Randa’s Market, alongside the dice and cigarette lighters for sale. Zeidan said he still misses the mouser that became the block’s mayor.
Darrell Smith stopped by the market on Monday, part of a weekly ritual that also involves ordering a mixed plate at the nearby Hawaiian barbecue spot. He missed Kit Kat, he said, but felt that dwelling on the robot car seemed like a waste of time.
“I’m skeptical about those Waymo cars myself,” he said. “But AI is the future. We can’t stop it whether we like it or not.”
