“I have a flight to catch, why is this thing going in a circle?”
Do or Donut
A man had the misfortune of becoming trapped inside a driverless Waymo taxi as it drove around a Scottsdale, Arizona parking lot in circles — instead of getting him to the airport for his imminent flight.
Tech entrepreneur Mike Johns shared a video of the distressing encounter on LinkedIn last month.
“I have a flight to catch, why is this thing going in a circle?” an exasperated Johns told Waymo customer service in the video. “I’m going dizzy.”
“I’ve got my seatbelt on, I can’t get out of the car,” he said. “Has this been hacked? What’s going on?”
Fortunately, Johns eventually got a refund and even made it to the airport in time, as the LA Times reports.
Nonetheless, the incident highlights the significant rough edges that remain for robotaxis, even as they become an increasingly common sight on US streets. Despite years of research and development, plenty of vehicles are still getting stuck — to their helpless customers’ dismay.
“My Waymo experience sucked,” Johns wrote in the caption of his video. “Mind you I was on my way to the airport and nearly missed my flight. I’ll keep it old fashion and just Lyft or Uber.”
Ride Along
Waymo, a subsidiary of Google owner Alphabet, launched its robotaxi service in LA last fall. For years now, the company has been offering driverless ride-hailing to riders in both Phoenix and San Francisco.
As Waymo plans expansions in Austin, Miami, and Tokyo, Japan, it stands out in a crowded field of would-be competitors — most notably Elon Musk’s Tesla — trying to make the idea of a driverless taxi service a reality.
There have been considerable growing pains for most of those ventures, from robotaxis getting stuck in roundabouts to smashing into delivery robots. As the New York Times reported in September, robotaxi services often require humans to take over control as a result.
General Motors’ Waymo competitor Cruise has become the poster child of the tech’s shortcomings, with the company shutting down in December following several hair-raising safety incidents.
Whether the services will ever provide an advantage over getting a ride from a human driver remains unclear. A study by Forbes last year found that Waymo rides aren’t just more expensive, but they take twice as long on average.
In short, their presence on public streets has not only become a nuisance but a glimpse of an automated future that foregoes human connection in favor of efficiency and profit (which, it’s worth noting, still seems a long way off).
“It’s just, again, a case of today’s digital world,” Johns told CBS News. ” A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle.”
“Human-less, right?” he added. “Human-less. “That’s the ghost in the shell, right?”
More on robotaxis: Tesla Has Secretly Been Testing Robotaxis