Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing service is going through a lot of firsts these days.
Earlier this week, a pregnant woman in San Francisco gave birth inside one of the company’s self-driving vehicles while taking it to the hospital in lieu of an ambulance.
Now, a different woman has experienced a very different kind of first when she hailed a Waymo cab for her daughter in Los Angeles. As she lays out in a video that has since gone viral on TikTok, she was baffled to find a stranger hiding in the vehicle’s trunk.
“Why the f*** are you in the trunk?!” the mother yells at him.
“This s*** won’t let me out,” he replied, while punching the back of the headrest.
“They put me in here,” the man claimed. “The people. The people.”
In a followup video, the mother can be heard chatting remotely with a Waymo representative while the man was being apprehended by two police officers on the sidewalk after being freed from the trunk.
It’s hard to imagine this kind of thing happening if a human driver were involved, as having a man hiding in the trunk would’ve been noticed immediately.
In a statement, Waymo didn’t deny the incident had happened.
“We’re committed to keeping our riders safe and earning the trust of the communities where we operate,” a Waymo spokesperson told the New York Post. “This experience was unacceptable, and we are actively implementing changes to address this.”
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