GoKawiilIt’s Bullitt meets Christine meets Waymo.
A new short film imagines a San Francisco car chase where the other driver isn’t human — and the car may be trying to kill you. That a robotaxi can now be cast as the villain with almost no explanation says something about the present moment. Autonomous cars have gone from sci-fi curiosities to fixtures in some American cities, where they’ve become stand-ins for anxieties about AI job displacement, Big Tech surveillance, and machines making decisions once left to humans.
Road Rage, the planned short film awaiting $40,000 on Kickstarter to fund production, leans into all of it. The film pits Joa, a ridehail driver in a manual-transmission car, against Roboride, an autonomous vehicle that takes a minor road-rage incident very personally, according to a synopsis by its director, Romain Thomassin. Roboride lightly clips Joa’s mirror. Joa gives it the finger. The car decides to kill him.
“It’s analog versus artificial,” Thomassin told The Verge.
The AI bad guy will be played by an old Prius transformed with cold LED lights across the front — à la Tesla — fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like device on the roof, a black exterior, and a menacing, ever-blinking red dot. Thomassin calls the intended result a “nasty Waymo.”
“I really wanted to play the nasty, gritty look of the ’70s car chase, but with today’s robotaxi in today’s San Francisco,” he said.
The chase itself will be a throwback: real cars, real actors, and real stunts.
“I really wanted to play the nasty, gritty look of the ’70s car chase, but with today’s robotaxi in today’s San Francisco.” — Road Rage director Romain Thomassin
“What makes Joa the good guy is not only his instinct but also his authenticity,” Thomassin said, noting a scene in which the character has an unexpected conversation with his passengers. “This type of human interaction doesn’t happen in a robotaxi.”
Thomassin doesn’t actually think robotaxis are inherently evil. But as a movie villain, they come preloaded with tension. For one thing, they’re replacing the kind of worker his protagonist represents. Joa is a Mexican immigrant trying to make a living driving in an increasingly expensive San Francisco. Robotaxis are already competing with ridehail drivers, just as generative AI is competing with workers in Thomassin’s own industry.
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