Driverless Waymo taxi traps passengers while stopped in traffic on one of Austins scariest roads: report

Way mo’ than they bargained for.Passengers using a popular driverless taxi app were trapped inside the fully autonomous vehicle as it parked in the middle of traffic on “one of the scariest streets in Austin,” according to a report.Waymo ride-hailers in the Texas city drove right into a “Black Mirror” episode when their self-driving car stopped in a merging lane underneath the MoPac Expressway and locked them inside for several minutes as vehicles whizzed by, according to Chron.“We kept saying ‘We’re on a highway, please move the car,’” passenger Becky Navarro said in a video that’s garnered over 500k views on TikTok.“Cars kept honking at us, and it would not move.It would not let us out,” Navarro said while walking with her fellow passenger on the side of the road with the dysfunctional car in the background.In a caption to the video, Navarro — who was let out of the car after about five minutes — claimed that the Waymo vehicle drove past their desired destination and towards Austin’s downtown area.Later in the video, the car apparently wakes up from its slumber and speeds right past its two former passengers, walking on the side of the road.“For people who don’t know — this is one of the scariest roads in Austin.

Being parked on Mopac is a death trap.This is my fear,” one animated TikTok commenter wrote, Chron reported.Navarro claimed that the car only unlocked its doors when the self-professed “TikTok queen” threatened customer support with going live on the social media app — but Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., claimed the whole issue was a user error.“During their ride, the passengers in the video pressed the ‘pull over’ button and the vehicle pulled to the side of a 30 mph road with a sidewalk,” a rep for Waymo said in comment to Chron.“The riders could have safely exited at any time and at no point did our Rider Support team remotely unlock the door for them,” Waymo ad...