A viral video shows two bozos blocking a driverless taxi in San Francisco and demanding the phone number of a terrified passenger.
The victim, a technical employee named Amina, posted a message a video for X whereupon two men block the path of her Waymo car, refuse to step aside and demand her number.
“Stop! No! Go! Go!” Amina shouted as the less slick couple grinned and called her over.
“I got stuck as a result when the car came to a stop on the street,” Amina wrote on X. “The first man was standing in front of the car about a minute before I started filming. Then he came along again, the second man came with him.
After Amina stopped filming to call Waymo’s support service in the car, “a random man with a blowtorch” joined the disgusting display, she wrote. “I was afraid more men would come, but luckily they didn’t.”
Waymo, which operates self-driving taxis in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, apologized to Amina on X and the Alphabet-owned company told the San Francisco Standard that these types of incidents are “excessively common among the 100,000 trips we make per week.”
Yet this isn’t the only recent incident of Waymo taxi terror.
In February, a man who appeared to be homeless attacked a couple’s Waymo car and tried to jam its sensors, which would have immobilized the vehicle and left them at the man’s mercy. ABC San Francisco reports this.
“If we had walked outside, we could have walked away, run away. If we were driving, we could make sure we locked the door. In this case we literally had no control,” one of the victims told ABC.
Waymo later emailed the couple, advising passengers to stay indoors “if a pedestrian attacks the vehicle.”
Amina accepted Waymo’s apology.
“The Waymo team was great and called me with support in the car. They also called me to follow up and were great at resolving this issue,” she wrote. “I may still take them with me, but I’ll be careful when using them alone.”
