A month ago, a video circulated around social media of a Waymo robotaxi stuck in a roundabout loop – an isolated incident with no passengers in the vehicle, according to Waymo.
Apparently, it wasn’t a one-time thing.
Around the same time, in another Waymo robotaxi headed for the Phoenix airport, Mike Johns, founder and CEO of AI consultancy Digital Mind State, also found himself circling a parking lot, unable to stop the car or get out.
The videos were posted within a couple of days of each other. Waymo has not confirmed whether the incidents happened at the same time or if there were other similar loopy incidents, but says it issued software updates to fix the issue.
Johns was stuck in the Waymo going through a loop for “under seven minutes,” but he says it “felt like forever,” particularly as he feared he would miss his flight and questioned whether the car had been hacked. It was his second time in a Waymo robotaxi.
A Waymo spokesperson confirmed the incident. “This event occurred in early December and has since been addressed by a regularly scheduled software update. The vehicle completed the rider’s trip and they were not charged for the ride.”
A Waymo customer support specialist called into the car without Johns’s prompting, he told TechCrunch. The agent said she had received a notification that his car “might be experiencing some routing issue,” according to a video of the incident Johns shared.
To solve the issue, the specialist asked Johns to open his Waymo app and “tap ‘My Trip’ in the lower left corner of [the] app,” to which Johns responded, “Can’t you just do it? You should be able to handle it, take over the car, you don’t need my phone.”
A fair question to ask, given that such a takeover is ostensibly what a remote assistant is for.
“I don’t have an option to control the car,” she confessed.
Waymo tells TechCrunch that its rider support agents are different from its fleet response team, which is what the autonomous driving software (known as the “Waymo Driver”) taps for help if it encounters an unfamiliar situation on the road.
Rider support agents, like the one Johns spoke with, can respond to outreach from riders — riders can get in touch through the Waymo app and a call button in the vehicle. They can also “initiate contact if the Waymo vehicle’s diagnostics indicate such a need.” But they don’t interact directly with the vehicle’s driving software.
In the end, Johns says, following the support agent’s directions in the app got the robotaxi back on course.
Johns said Waymo compensated him for the ride and directed him to its website to file a complaint. The company did not reach out to him immediately after the incident, but did so this week after his video got picked up by major news outlets.
“My biggest thing is in this digital age that we’re in, we’re so disconnected from the human factor,” Johns told TechCrunch. “I’m all for AI. I’m at that forefront between AI, automation, robotics, but there still is a human factor.”
Missy Cummings, a professor of autonomy and robotics at George Mason University and former senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, says that this incident, though small, demonstrates a larger issue that AV companies should solve for.
“In any robotic system, there’s a big red button somewhere that, if pressed, that thing will disengage,” Cummings told TechCrunch, noting that the button could be hidden somewhere in the car that’s difficult to get to. “And I’ll tell you that’s a really important security measure going forward because what happens if the car…has been hacked by someone and there’s a passenger inside the vehicle? You definitely need the ability to remotely stop everything in the car so they can get out.”
Waymo told TechCrunch that, in fact, “Waymo vehicles have a pull over button available to riders at all times,” located in the app and on the passenger screen, but Johns said the support agent didn’t tell him about this, and he didn’t see it.
Cummings also noted that asking the rider to be an active participant in the fix by using their app is “error-prone” due to potential connectivity issues and non-user friendly apps.
“I was just blown away that she was trying to get him to go into his phone to bring some resolution to this when this is clearly an urgent situation that needs to be attended to right away,” Cummings said. “She should have said, ‘Look, pull up the left corner of the mat on the floor and you’ll see a red button. Hit that button.’”