Associated Incidents
A viral video shows two bozos blocking a driverless taxi in San Francisco, demanding the phone number of a terrified passenger.
The victim, a tech worker who goes by Amina, posted a video to X showing two men blocking the path of her Waymo car, refusing to step aside and demanding her number.
“Stop! No! Go! Go!” Amina yelled as the less-than-slick pair grinned and catcalled her.
“It left me stuck as the car was stalled in the street,” Amina wrote on X. “The first guy stood in front of the car about a minute before I started filming. Then he came around again the second guy came with him.”
After Amina stopped filming to call Waymo’s in-car support service, “a random guy walking with a blow torch” joined the disgusting display, she wrote. “I was afraid more men would crowd around which thankfully didn’t happen.”
Waymo, which operates self-driving taxis in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, apologized to Amina on X, and the Alphabet-owned company told the San Francisco Standard that incidents like this are “exceedingly rate among the 100,000 trips we serve a week.”
Still, this isn’t the only recent incident of Waymo taxi terror.
In February, a man who appeared to be homeless attacked a couple’s Waymo car and attempted to block its sensors, which would have immobilized the vehicle and left them at the man’s mercy, ABC San Francisco reported.“If we were outside walking we could’ve walked away, run away. If we were driving, we could make sure we locked the door. In this instance, we literally had no control,” one of the victims told ABC.
Waymo later emailed the couple, advising passengers to stay inside “when a pedestrian attacks the vehicle.”
Amina has accepted Waymo’s apology.
“The Waymo team was great and called me with the in-car support. They also called me to follow up and all around good at solving this problem,” she wrote. “I may still take them but will be careful taking it alone.”