SF Chronicle – ‘They’re going to kill me’: A Waymo rider was trapped inside as vandals smashed the robotaxi
Editors note: yet another example of where a human driver would have easily gotten the rider out of this dangerous situation. Waymo being absolutely unhelpful borders on criminal. People are now longing for the good ol’ days when folks just put cones on the clankers.
See original article by Rachel Swan at the SF Chronicle
As the Waymo pulled up to a stoplight in San Francisco’s Marina District, Sherman Watson raked his eyes over the empty road, and saw a silhouette approaching in the darkness.
He was riding shotgun, peering out at the vast grid of Pierce and Lombard streets. It was nearing 3:30 a.m. on May 9, and all was quiet among the glass-fronted buildings and grooved, concrete sidewalks of the waterfront neighborhood. Toward the Verizon store on his right, he glimpsed a man in a hooded sweatshirt, striding purposefully toward the car.
It looked as though he had been “lying in wait,” Watson later recalled.
In a flash the man grabbed the Waymo’s front bumper, causing the autonomous vehicle to stop. A second assailant approached and the two took turns bashing the front windshield with an object that had the shape of a stick. As the glass splintered, forming spiderweb cracks in front of Watson’s face, a voice came over the robotaxi’s intercom. The car’s remote assistant had noticed the car was not moving, and decided to call police.
Watson grew frantic. He asked Waymo’s support team when law enforcement would arrive, but they didn’t know. He asked if they could move the car, and they declined, saying it was obstructed. From the corner of his eye, Watson saw one of the assailants staring at him through the passenger-side window. The man swung “something heavy,” he said, and struck the laminated glass.
“That’s when I was like, ‘I’m gonna die,’” Watson told the Chronicle. While dialing 911 on his cellphone, he pleaded with the intercom voice.
“Please, please, get me out of here,” he said. “They’re going to kill me.”
His attack is the latest incident to convulse San Francisco’s dominant autonomous vehicle operator as the company expands its service territory and works to build public trust. Waymo, which is owned by Silicon Valley titan Alphabet, has billed its fleet as a safe alternative to human drivers. But since launching passenger service two years ago, the company has struggled to protect riders from threatening situations when the vehicle cannot maneuver around them.
Spokespeople for Waymo were not immediately available to comment.
Another high-profile episode happened in the fall of 2024, when a 28-year-old woman filmed two men who stood in front of her Waymo vehicle as it waited at a stoplight in SoMa. In the footage, the men make hand gestures and appear to ask for the rider’s phone number. The woman, who identified herself to the Chronicle as Amina V., repeatedly tells the men to leave and stop blocking traffic. She said she managed to click the “in-car support” on the screen once the men left, and was asked by a prompt if she was ok and needed police report. She said she didn’t.
The incident report that police filed in Watson’s case describes a disturbing scene. Two officers pulled up to the intersection at 3:46 a.m., found the damaged Waymo and began interviewing Watson. The two assailants had left minutes before, following what Watson would later remember as 10 minutes of terror. At one point, he told the Chronicle, one of the men climbed on top of the vehicle’s hood and roof.
Although Waymo cars are designed with interior cameras and security features like doors that prevent unauthorized people from entering from the outside, they also give riders the sensation of being trapped — and at the mercy of customer service — when the cars become immobilized.
“You can’t honk the horn,” Watson said. “You can’t flash the lights. You can’t do anything to get out of there.”
Notably, the police report captures an unsettling gap between Watson’s experience of being inside a robotaxi as it was beset by vandals, and the official classification of the incident. The report, and subsequent police communications, identify the self-driving car and tech company — not Watson — as victims of malicious mischief. Watson is merely a witness to the crime. Police officials pointed out that when Watson spoke with officers, he told them he was not injured, though Watson told the Chronicle he noticed what he believed was a small laceration later that morning.
“If he’d like to come back and file a supplemental report indicating he was an injured victim, or that he thought (the assailants) were going to kill him, we would gladly take it,” said San Francisco Police Department spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky.
After giving his statement to the police he took an Uber home to Nob Hill and woke up to feel pain behind his ear. He thought a piece of glass had burst from the window and pierced his skin. A Waymo customer support representative called and referred him to an insurance carrier for medical and mental health care. He sought therapy to help process the attack, and now wants Waymo to turn over the video footage so he can better understand what happened.
So far, his attempts to get the video have been unsuccessful. The company deferred his request to police, saying in an email that “we’re unable to access any footage without proper legal justification.” Police Capt. Christopher Del Gandio said in an email to Watson that Waymo “usually requires a search warrant from the police department to access any footage.”
Since Waymo was the victim of vandalism, Del Gandio said, the department’s hands were somewhat tied, because “we can’t issue a search warrant on behalf of Waymo.”
Watson relayed his frustrations in a recent NextDoor post, saying he would still like a definitive audio and visual account of the attack, “so I can have a reference as to what was happening to me.” He concluded the post by warning people to never take an autonomous vehicle after dark.
See original article by Rachel Swan at the SF Chronicle
