A Los Angeles man who was trying to make his way to an Arizona airport in one of Waymo’s driverless taxis last month got stuck in an incredibly frustrating loop where the car just traveled in circles. The man even says he almost missed his flight back home. And while Waymo tells Gizmodo the issue has been resolved, it’s still not clear what went wrong.
Mike Johns, a tech entrepreneur in L.A., wrote about his experience on LinkedIn, even including a video of the ordeal. That video spread far and wide on social media platforms.
“My Monday was fine till i got into one of Waymo’s ‘humanless’ cars. I get in, buckle up (safety first) and the saga begins,” wrote Johns. “This autonomous vehicle said to heck with GPS, the car just went around in circles, eight circles at that.”
Johns, who didn’t immediately respond to a message sent through his website, says he wondered if someone was pranking him.
“Is someone pulling a prank, is this car hacked? It [felt] like a scene in a sci fi thriller. My Waymo experience sucked. Mind you I was on my way to the airport and nearly missed my flight. I’ll keep it old fashion and just Lyft or Uber,” Johns continued.
Waymo, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, told Gizmodo the rider wasn’t charged for his trip and has attempted to contact Johns but they haven’t connected yet. Waymo also emphasizes the circling lasted about five minutes. Johns told ABC15 Arizona that he was frustrated by the experience and “It’s like people are the experiment.”
Johns also told CBS News Los Angeles that he didn’t like the attitude of the technical support person (or robot) he was encountering and wasn’t sure if he was talking to a human or AI during the circling.
“Where’s the empathy? Where’s the human connection to this?” Johns told CBS News. “It’s just, again, a case of today’s digital world. A half-baked product and nobody meeting the customer, the consumers, in the middle.”
This isn’t the first time that Waymo cars have gotten very confused and seemingly gotten stuck in loops. Back in December, auto news outlet Jalopnik reported on a Waymo vehicle that appeared to get stuck in a roundabout in Arizona, circling at least 37 times. That vehicle didn’t have a passenger at the time.
There have also been more disturbing incidents with driverless cars, like the time a Waymo hit a cyclist in San Francisco back in Feb. 2024. There was also the time in May 2024 when a Waymo vehicle hit a telephone poll, prompting a recall of the company’s mapping tech.
Johns compared his experience to a science fiction movie, which isn’t uncommon when people experience strange things with new technology. And it can be difficult to tell what went wrong from the passenger’s perspective. When I took a Waymo in Los Angeles a couple of months ago, the vehicle darted off just as I was about to get inside. The car decided that I should instead be picked up in a turn lane, a much more dangerous decision that a human driver probably wouldn’t have made.
But this is certainly the future, if only because without drivers companies like Waymo can undercut the price of services like Uber and Lyft. At least until they put human drivers fully out of business. At that point, they can just raise the price like they did after Uber decimated the taxi industry. Time marches on.