Earlier this week, a woman made a startling discovery while hailing a Waymo autonomous cab for her daughter in Los Angeles: a quick glance into the back of the vehicle revealed a stranger, who’d been hiding from view in the trunk.
“This s*** won’t let me out,” the man shouted after being confronted, in a video shared by the woman. “They put me in here,” he added, accusing unspecified “people” of trapping him.
A chaotic followup video shows the man being detained by two police officers on the sidewalk, while the woman is talking to a Waymo representative over the vehicle’s sound system.
The Los Angeles Police Department has since confirmed to CBS News that it’s investigating the incident.
“They had let him go,” the woman, who discovered the man in the trunk, wrote in a comment on her TikTok video after a user asked her what happened to the man, but didn’t elaborate any further.
Detectives are working with Waymo to review footage. Waymo also told CBS that riders should double-check the car and dial 911 if something is off.
“We’re committed to keeping our riders safe and earning the trust of the communities where we operate,” a spokesperson told the broadcaster. “This experience was unacceptable, and we are actively implementing changes to address this.”
We also don’t know how the man got into the trunk in the first place, or whether he stayed hidden during any previous journeys.
Users on the Waymo subreddit suggested he would’ve had to dive into the trunk from the backseat, as climbing into the trunk could’ve easily been captured on camera and picked up by sensors.
“It seems extremely bizarre that Waymo, armed to the teeth with cameras and capable of detecting left-behind items, was unable to detect the security/safety threat of a human being stowed in the luggage area,” one user argued.
It’s only the latest in a lengthy series of incidents involving Waymo’s autonomous vehicles. We’ve come across reports of the cars plowing over pets, blasting through an active police standoff in downtown LA, and even a collision involving two Waymo vehicles crashing into each other, trapping a third.
Just earlier this week, a pregnant woman in San Francisco gave birth inside one of the vehicles, in another unusual first.
It should therefore not come as a surprise that Waymo has plenty of kinks to still iron out, despite operating ride-hailing services for over half a decade.
Just this week, Waymo recalled over 3,000 of its vehicles in the US over a software issue, in which the company’s software caused it to drive past stopped school buses, endangering children.
Texas officials had rung the alarm bells earlier this year, arguing Waymo’s vehicles had illegally passed school buses at least 19 times since the beginning of the school year, triggering an NHTSA investigation.
It’s a strange new facet of living in the year 2025. Without the presence of a human driver, adult stowaways are seemingly having little trouble hiding in the trunks of autonomous cabs.
“Wow,” one TikTok user commented. “Now ima pop the truck first before I get in another Waymo ever again. That’s insane.”
More on the incident: Woman Orders Waymo, Finds Man Hiding in Trunk