Man nearly misses flight as self-driving Waymo taxi drives around parking lot in circles
By Laurie Perez and Dean Fioresi
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LOS ANGELES (KCAL, KCBS) — A Los Angeles man nearly missed his flight back home last week, all because he says the self-driving Waymo taxi he was using to get to the airport wouldn’t stop driving around a parking lot in circles.
Mike Johns was heading home from Scottsdale, Arizona last week when he hopped into a Waymo to head to a nearby airport. What happened next felt like a Disneyland ride.
“Why is this thing going in a circle? I’m getting dizzy,” Johns said in a video posted on social media that has since gone viral, garnering more than two million views and interactions.
Johns says that he was trapped inside of the car as it spun around the parking lot. Not only was he unable to stop the car, but so was the customer service he was on the phone with as the spinning continued.
“It’s circling around a parking lot. I’ve got my seatbelt on, I can’t get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What’s going on?” Johns says in the video.
The Waymo representative was finally able to get the car under control after a few minutes, allowing him to get to the airport just in time to catch his flight back to LA.
He says that the lack of empathy from the representative who attempted to help him, on top of the point that he’s unsure if he was talking to a human or AI, are major concerns.
“Where’s the empathy? Where’s the human connection to this?” Johns said while speaking with CBS News Los Angeles. “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.”
Johns, who ironically works in the tech industry himself, says he would love to see services like Waymo succeed, but he has no plans to hop in for a ride until he’s sure that the kinks have been fixed.
In the meantime, he’s still waiting for someone from Waymo to contact him in regards to his concerns, which hasn’t yet happened despite how much attention his video has attracted since last week.
“Human-less, right? Human-less,” he said. “That’s the ghost in the shell, right?”
Waymo has not yet responded to CBS News’ request for comment on the incident.
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