A Monday morning car ride turned chaotic for a Los Angeles tech entrepreneur when his self-driving taxi malfunctioned, trapping him for several minutes and nearly causing him to miss a flight. Mike Johns was on his way to the airport in Phoenix in an autonomous Waymo vehicle when it began circling a parking lot.
As the car looped around the same spot eight times, Mr Johns frantically sought assistance from Waymo’s support team over the phone. “I got my seat belt on. I can’t get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What’s going on?” Mr Johns can be heard saying in a video he shared on LinkedIn. “I feel like I’m in the movies. Is somebody playing a joke on me? And I got a flight to catch.”
He said the vehicle continued its dizzying loops in a “sci-fi thriller” moment. “Why is this happening to me on a Monday?” he said in the video.
A Waymo representative, who guided Mr Johns through the company’s app, admitted she didn’t “have an option to control the car.” The issue was eventually resolved within a few minutes, allowing Mr Johns to catch his delayed flight to Southern California.
Despite the unsettling experience, Mr Johns, a self-described futurist and AI enthusiast, said he wasn’t deterred from using driverless cars. “As a futurist, I feel like this is where everything is headed, so you might as well get there first,” he told The Guardian. “It’s just we have glitches that need stitches.”
Waymo, which has been testing autonomous ride services in select US cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin, attributed the incident to a software glitch, which has since been addressed through a routine update. The company confirmed that Mr Johns was not charged for the ride.
In the wake of the ordeal, Mr Johns said he would “keep it old-fashioned” and stick to services like Lyft or Uber for the time being. “It’s just, again, a case of today’s digital world,” he told CBS Los Angeles. “A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle.”
