Driverless Waymo taxi ‘traps' passengers while stopped in traffic on one of Austin's ‘scariest roads': report
Passengers using a popular driverless taxi app were trapped inside the fully autonomous vehicle as it parked in the middle of traffic on 'one of the scariest streets in Austin,' according to a report.
Waymo ride-hailers in the Texas city drove right into a 'Black Mirror' episode when their self-driving car stopped in a merging lane underneath the MoPac Expressway and locked them inside for several minutes as vehicles whizzed by, according to Chron.
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'We kept saying 'We're on a highway, please move the car,'' passenger Becky Navarro said in a video that's garnered over 500k views on TikTok.
3 TikToker Becky Navarro claimed her Waymo taxi glitched out during a ride — locking her while the car sat still on a busy roadway.
tiktok/@beckypearlatx
'Cars kept honking at us, and it would not move. It would not let us out,' Navarro said while walking with her fellow passenger on the side of the road with the dysfunctional car in the background.
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In a caption to the video, Navarro — who was let out of the car after about five minutes — claimed that the Waymo vehicle drove past their desired destination and towards Austin's downtown area.
Later in the video, the car apparently wakes up from its slumber and speeds right past its two former passengers, walking on the side of the road.
'For people who don't know — this is one of the scariest roads in Austin. Being parked on Mopac is a death trap. This is my fear,' one animated TikTok commenter wrote, Chron reported.
Navarro claimed that the car only unlocked its doors when the self-professed 'TikTok queen' threatened customer support with going live on the social media app — but Waymo, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet Inc., claimed the whole issue was a user error.
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3 After the two passengers exited the vehicle, the driverless car was seen jetting down the street.
tiktok/@beckypearlatx
'During their ride, the passengers in the video pressed the 'pull over' button and the vehicle pulled to the side of a 30 mph road with a sidewalk,' a rep for Waymo said in comment to Chron.
'The riders could have safely exited at any time and at no point did our Rider Support team remotely unlock the door for them,' Waymo added.
The company further said that passengers can pause their ride and exit the vehicle at any time, the local outlet reported.
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3 Waymo is a driverless taxi ride-hailing app that operates in four major cities in the United States.
Source: Waymo
Waymo, however, has had prior issues with allegedly locking passengers inside its driverless cars — which operate in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin.
Tech entrepreneur Mike Johns took a Waymo driverless taxi to the Scottsdale Airport in Arizona earlier this year when his escort glitched out and drove in circles instead of towards his destination.
'I got a flight to catch. Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy,' Johns said to a Waymo customer service representative in a video posted to LinkedIn.
A company staffer was eventually able to get control of the vehicle remotely, allowing the LA native to catch his flight home.
The remote operation of Waymo vehicles has come in handy on other occasions — with LA cops shutting down a getaway driverless car that a thief hailed after robbing a grocery store.
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