We’ve seen Waymo’s fleet of autonomous taxis cause plenty of mayhem on public streets. They like to ignore bike lanes, drive the wrong way down busy roads, and even rely on remote workers in the Philippines when they get stumped.
Riding them can also quickly turn into a terrifying near-death experience, as one couple in San Francisco found out firsthand. As CBS News reports, the couple was looking to get home in the Mission District only for their Waymo cab to veer off a highway and accelerate to terrifying speeds while driving down a construction lane.
All the while, police vehicles were trying to chase it down with sirens blaring.
“There were construction signs,” resident Elliot Slade told the broadcaster over the weekend. “There were lights going on. Police in the distance and it sped up. That’s when I looked at my fiancée, we’re done.”
“This is it,” he added. “We’re dead. We’re going to die right here in the Waymo.”
The terrifying incident underlines the very real dangers of relying on autonomous vehicles for ride shares, while they still suffer from nagging technical shortcomings that are putting people in danger. It could also further erode public trust in the tech.
In the last two months alone, Waymo’s vehicles have been observed driving through flooded streets and speeding through construction zones, as USA Today reports.
The latest incident also proved scary enough for Waymo to pull its cars from freeways in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami altogether as it works to “integrate recent technical learnings into our software,” according to a statement to CBS.
The offending Waymo vehicle “started freaking out,” Slade recalled, because of a slew of merging lanes, causing cars to be “all over the place.” Smartphone footage Slade recorded shows the dramatic incident from his perspective.
“Holy s***, dude,” Slade can be heard saying in the clip.
After speeding up for around 20 seconds, the Waymo eventually pulled over, with a representative chiming in over the car’s audio system. Understandably, Slade and his partner were desperate to leave and never look back.
“She came on the line and said from what I could see, it seemed like a stressful experience,” Slade told CBS. “What do you want to do next? I was like we want to get out. They’re like do you want to continue the journey; I was like absolutely not.”
Waymo offered the rattled occupant $40 worth of free rides, but understandably, he’s now unsure about climbing back into one of its vehicles.
“It was one of those things, once you lost your autonomy in the car, I don’t want to feel that again,” Slade told CBS. “Like it was a really freaky moment.”
Meanwhile, a spokesperson told the broadcaster that the company expects to resume its freeway routes “soon.”
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