A Los Angeles man almost missed his flight home last week, all because he says the self-driving Waymo taxi he used to get to the airport wouldn’t stop circling a parking lot.
Mike Johns was on his way home from Scottsdale, Arizona, last week when he hopped into a Waymo to head to a nearby airport. What happened next felt like a ride at Disneyland.
“Why is this thing going in a circle? I’m getting dizzy,” Johns said in a social media video that has since gone viral, racking up more than two million views and interactions.
Johns says he was trapped in the car as it spun around the parking lot. Not only could he not stop the car, but neither could the customer service person he was on the phone with while the spinning continued.
“He’s circling a parking lot. I’ve got my seat belt on, I can’t get out of the car. Is this hacked? What’s going on?” Johns says in the video.
The Waymo representative was finally able to gain control of the car after a few minutes, making it to the airport just in time to catch his flight back to LA.
He says the lack of empathy from the representative who tried to help him, in addition to not being sure whether he was speaking to a human or AI, is a major concern.
“Where’s the empathy? Where’s the human connection to this?” Johns said while speaking to CBS News Los Angeles. “It’s yet another example of today’s digital world. A half-baked product and no one meets the customer, the consumer, in the middle.”
Johns, who ironically works in the tech industry himself, says he’d like to see services like Waymo succeed, but he doesn’t plan to take a ride until he’s confident the problems are fixed.
In the meantime, he’s still waiting for someone from Waymo to contact him about his concerns, which hasn’t happened yet despite how much attention his video has attracted since last week.
‘Humanless, right? Humanless,” he said. “That’s the ghost in the shell, right?”
Waymo has not yet responded to CBS News’ request for comment on the incident.
This news comes just days after Waymo rrecently made headlines in Los Angeles when someone tried to hijack one of their autonomous, all-electric Jaguars downtown.