Houston Chron – Passengers say they were trapped inside driverless vehicle in Austin
See original article by Ariana Garcia at the Houston Chron
“Cars kept honking at us, and it would not move. It would not let us out.”
Waymo’s self-driving vehicles are reportedly growing increasingly popular in Austin, but a potentially dangerous incident on Sunday may have people thinking twice before hitching one of the autonomous rides. A woman named Becky Levin Navarro took to TikTok on Sunday after her Waymo ride to the Deep Eddy Cabaret took an unexpected route. Navarro said the driverless taxi suddenly stopped underneath the MoPac Expressway, in a spot near where two lanes merge, and locked her and other passengers inside.
As other vehicles whizzed by, Navarro’s safety concerns grew. The group contacted customer support for help, but were told they could not move the Waymo. “We kept saying ‘we’re on a highway, please move the car,'” Navarro said. “Cars kept honking at us, and it would not move. It would not let us out.” In one clip included in the video, a Waymo customer service representative is heard telling Navarro and fellow passengers, “We don’t have a way to just physically move the cars,” as they waited for assistance.
The group was stuck in the car for 5 minutes and 11 seconds, Navarro said. Growing impatient, they requested to be let out of the car to walk the rest of the way to their destination instead. The representative insisted he needed a specific address before unlocking the vehicle, despite the group telling him they had provided their location multiple times.
Navarro claimed it wasn’t until she threatened to go live on TikTok to document the situation that the car suddenly unlocked. As they walked away, the car remained in the same spot. At a further distance, the car suddenly roared back to life and drove past them. “Now it wants to go,” Navarro said.
The video has garnered more than 114,000 views on TikTok and hundreds of comments bashing Waymo. “They need to be sued for this. They literally put you in the path of danger and then locked you in the car???” one person commented. “The fact that people are locked in is 1000% why I will never drive in an automated share ride vehicle,” another wrote. “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!” another person commented.
In an email to Chron, Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli said passengers can always pause the ride and exit the vehicle by pulling the handle twice—once to unlock and another to open the door. “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,” Bonelli wrote. “The riders could have safely exited at any time and at no point did our Rider Support team remotely unlock the door for them.”
If the incident was truly due to a technical glitch, it wouldn’t be the first for Waymo this year. In January, a man on the way to an airport in Phoenix also got stuck in one of the driverless vehicles, with the car repeatedly circling around a parking lot. Per TechCrunch, a Waymo robotaxi reportedly caused a traffic jam at Chick-fil-A in California earlier this month after getting stuck in the fast food restaurant’s drive-thru.
Waymo has operated in Austin with varying degrees of activity since 2015, when it completed the first fully driverless ride in the city.
In 2019, Waymo closed its Central Texas operations to focus on projects in Detroit and Phoenix. In 2023, the company returned to Austin and now partners with Uber to offer its autonomous ride-hailing services in the city. Recent data shows that in the last week of March, Waymo accounted for 20 percent of all Uber trips in Austin.
See original article by Ariana Garcia at the Houston Chron
