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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.
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