A woman was left mortified when the self-driving car she was in refused to… drive.
Mia McCarthly was excited to take a Waymo robot taxi ride with her boyfriend over the weekend.
But things soon went awry as the car stopped in the middle of an intersection as a trolley approached.
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The trolley driver waved for the vehicle to pass, but it wouldn’t budge.
The car simply advised it was ‘Waiting for the intersection to clear’ – even though the taxi itself was the roadblock.
Mia, a 23-year-old social media manager who lives in San Diego, California, ordered the ride in San Francisco.
She shared the experience in a video on Instagram on 1 Nov, which has over 42,000 likes.
“Other drivers were honking and the trolley operator got out to see what the issue was,” she told What’s The Jam.
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“The car said it was ‘waiting for the intersection to clear’ although we were the ones blocking it.
“The trolley operator waved his hands trying to push the car away, and we quickly called customer support to help us get out of the situation.
“The customer support agent told us that they can merely provide suggestions to the car to have it move and get out of the situation.
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“It was scary at first when we saw the trolley coming towards us, and as the situation progressed, it became embarrassing as drivers were honking at us and there was nothing we could do, since we, as the passengers, couldn’t get into the driver’s seat and override the vehicle ourselves.
“We ultimately started laughing at the absurdity of the situation and how helpless we felt, seeing as the car was fully in control and not even the customer service agents could manually ‘takeover’.”
Thankfully, after a few minutes, the car “realised” that it needed to back up.
Julia said: “How did we outsource DRIVING!?”
Someone else said, “If only there was this thing that used to sit in that front seat, what was it called again?”
Jakob added, “This would literally be a personal nightmare to me. The second-hand embarrassment alone would get me. The fact that I know I’m in the way, but I’m not directly the cause of the problem, and that I have no control or ability to move the vehicle out of the way, is awful. So embarrassing! I don’t understand why it just stops in the middle of the street like that.”
Someone else said, “All of this so they won’t give a job to an actual human being, wow.”
Another person said, “This is absolutely useless, omg.”
“’Provide suggestions to the car’. Nah, I’ll pass on AI Uber in the future,” added someone else.
Mia, who has taken self-driving cars before that were “smooth and had no issues”, claims she hasn’t heard from Waymo with an explanation for what happened.
She added, “I think it was just a confusing situation for the car that it hadn’t run into before.”
Jam Press has contacted Waymo for comment.
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