A Los Angeles man's attempt to use a Waymo driverless taxi to reach the airport took a bizarre turn when the vehicle got stuck in a five-minute loop, circling repeatedly. The rider, Mike Johns, expressed frustration over the incident, questioning the reliability of the technology and the lack of human interaction during the ordeal. Waymo, owned by Alphabet, has stated that the issue has been resolved and the rider was not charged.
Screenshots from a video posted by Mike Johns as he rode in a Waymo that just circled for about five minutes.A Los Angeles man who was trying to make his way to an Arizona airport in one of Waymo ’s driverless taxi s last month got stuck in an incredibly frustrating loop where the car just traveled in circles.
The man even says he almost missed his flight back home. And while Waymo tells Gizmodo the issue has been resolved, it’s still not clear what went wrong.“My Monday was fine till i got into one of Waymo’s ‘humanless’ cars. I get in, buckle up and the saga begins,” wrote Johns. “ This autonomous vehicle said to heck with GPS, the car just went around in circles, eight circles at that.” Johns, who didn’t immediately respond to a message sent through his website, says he wondered if someone was pranking him. “Is someone pulling a prank, is this car hacked? It like a scene in a sci fi thriller. My Waymo experience sucked. Mind you I was on my way to the airport and nearly missed my flight. I’ll keep it old fashion and just Lyft or Uber,” Johns continued. Waymo, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, told Gizmodo the rider wasn’t charged for his trip and has attempted to contact Johns but they haven’t connected yet. Waymo also emphasizes the circling lasted about five minutes. Johns toldthat he didn’t like the attitude of the technical support person he was encountering and wasn’t sure if he was talking to a human or AI during the circling. “Where’s the empathy? Where’s the human connection to this?” Johns told CBS News. “It’s just, again, a case of today’s digital world. A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle.” This isn’t the first time that Waymo cars have gotten very confused and seemingly gotten stuck in loops. Back in December, auto news outlet Jalopnik reported on a Waymo vehicle that appeared to get stuck in a roundabout in Arizona, circling at leastThere have also been more disturbing incidents with driverless cars, like the time a Waymo hit a cyclist in San Francisco back inJohns compared his experience to a science fiction movie, which isn’t uncommon when people experience strange things with new technology. And it can be difficult to tell what went wrong from the passenger’s perspective. When I took a Waymo in Los Angeles a couple of months ago, the vehicle darted off just as I was about to get inside. The car decided that I should instead be picked up in a turn lane, a much more dangerous decision that a human driver probably wouldn’t have made. But this is certainly the future, if only because without drivers companies like Waymo can undercut the price of services like Uber and Lyft. At least until they put human drivers fully out of business. At that point, they can just raise the price like they did after Uber decimated the taxi industry. Time marches on.Waymo Says Its Cars Are Officially Certified Against Crashing Into Emergency VehiclesA Stalled Waymo Blocked Kamala Harris’s Motorcade in San FranciscoWaymo’s Robotaxi Update Causes Late Night Robo-Honking in San Francisco, Pissing Off Locals30 Years Ago Today, It Was Friday in CaliforniaThe Acer Nitro Blaze 11 Is the Anti-Nintendo Switch
Waymo Driverless Taxi Autonomous Vehicle Loop Technology Failure
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