On Wednesday, a video was posted to Reddit featuring a nightmare scenario for Waymo riders.
Shot from inside the car, the video shows the robotaxi stopped at a light at Market and Sanchez streets. A man approaches the passenger side of the car and paws at the handle while muttering, then knocks on the window.
“Go away!” the rider yells.
The man reaches into his pocket and pulls out a knife, waving it around for a moment before shrugging and walking away.
It’s the latest in a string of viral incidents in San Francisco featuring people sitting in stopped Waymos while people harass or threaten them. One video, shared on social media by ABC7 reporter Dion Lim, shows men jumping on and off a stopped Waymo. The bystander who took the video told Lim that the car’s female passengers had stepped out of the vehicle in response, then gotten locked out.
Another video, posted to X on Sept. 24, features a man and his dog sitting in the passenger seat of a Waymo as graffiti taggers surround the car and use paint pens to vandalize the exterior. Less than a week later, a woman shared her experience of getting accosted by men who stopped her Waymo in the middle of a street.
Gazetteer SF was unable to find any reported incidents of a robotaxi passenger who has experienced a violent assault or robbery. But it’s clear that riders can get stuck in a potentially dangerous situation — and when they do, there’s no clear recourse, other than calling customer support and hoping for the best.
“The scariest part was that I felt a bit helpless without a driver that could have just floored the gas to get us out of the situation,” the rider wrote in Wednesday’s Reddit post.
Thus far, much of the critical safety discourse around robotaxis has had to do with the vehicles running into pedestrians, cars, and random objects. But some experts argue that the issue of more serious attacks on robotaxi passengers is a matter of when, not if — and companies like Waymo are choosing to kick the proverbial rider-safety can down the road, instead of dealing with the risk in a transparent and proactive way.
“Five years ago, people would’ve said this isn’t a real problem,” Phil Koopman, an expert in autonomous vehicle safety who has testified in Congress and written extensively about the robotaxi industry, told Gazetteer.
Koopman now argues that robotaxi companies are failing to offer a solution for extreme situations when a rider might be in immediate danger. While much has been written about how the absence of a human driver might keep riders (notably women and children) safer, Koopman says problems can arise when a robotaxi runs into a nuanced problem with no clear directive — as with, say, a possible attacker blocking the car.
“Human drivers don’t just drive. They are the captain of the ship and anything that can happen to it,” Koopman continued. “Well, if you put a computer in charge and it’s not capable of doing anything other than navigating traffic, who’s the real captain of the ship?”
Riders who experience minor problems are told to summon customer support through an app or in-vehicle button. For situations that pose an immediate danger, Waymo instructs passengers to “call 911 immediately from your phone” or hit the emergency button on the Waymo One app, which notifies customer support to contact law enforcement.
Where a human driver would try to find a way to flee from a dangerous situation, including by going off-road or otherwise evading someone who poses a threat, that’s not part of a robotaxi’s programming. (At least not yet.)
Waymo does have a team of remote operators who can use simple prompts to guide a robotaxi when it gets stuck — say, because of a broken traffic light or an obstruction on the road. But Koopman says that Waymo has maintained that remote operators cannot “drive” the robotaxis in the conventional sense, and are not there to deal with personal safety problems for riders. Instead, when cars get into serious issues, Waymo has a team of human drivers who can be dispatched to the car and manually drive it to its destination.
(Waymo did not respond to multiple queries by Gazetteer on its plans for handling rider safety or how much control a remote operator has over the vehicle.)
Koopman isn’t sure the solution is for customer service workers in a call center to be able to drive cars remotely away from dangerous situations. “Chances are, the time it requires for a random person to sort out what’s going on is longer than the reaction time needed for the rider,” he said.
A better solution may involve a highly skilled crack team of crisis specialists who are given full driving control of a robotaxi when there’s an emergency. But giving control to a human brings up questions of responsibility that the industry isn’t ready to answer, according to Koopman.
“Personal safety for riders is not a clear-cut insurance case, as it is with a pedestrian’s broken leg,” he said.
Robotaxi operations are continuing to bloom across the country. This year, Waymo brought its service to Los Angeles and Austin, and expanded its footprint in Phoenix and San Francisco. Other competitors will soon include Tesla’s new “Cybercab” and Amazon-owned Zoox, which on Wednesday announced that it will begin testing its vehicles in SF and Las Vegas soon.
Koopman predicts that the rapid growth of the industry will make the issue of rider safety increasingly relevant.
“It is yet another one of many problems that will finally arise when you go from 100 robotaxis to 1,000 and then 10,000. This is a scaling issue,” he said.
