Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic

These cars need to have a panic button that allows a remote operator to talk to the passengers, assess the situation, alert police and override the auto driving to get them out of bad situations. Same as an emergency call button on an elevator basically. I dont understand these cars to have any feature like that so far, and I'm assuming this woman would have used it if one was available, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

These cars are likely going to turn into hijack machines if they're programmed for "maximum safety" in situations where, realistically, breaking every traffic law, hitting a pedestrian or causing damage to the vehicle through dangerous terrain may be the only way out with a living passenger. The second it begins to percolate among criminals that these things are super easy to stop at the perfect location of your choosing like this, they are going to become a massive target.

Or they turn into a hearse if the passenger has a medical emergency and the car doesn't redirect while the passenger is incapacitated. They might be coherent enough to press a button, but not to open their phone, navigate the app, call for help or redirect the car to a hospital...

But that of course requires labor so it will not happen until legally mandated after a minimum threshold of people die.

I can see criminals easily exploiting this default behavior to stop the car and steal from those inside.

Where's a Johnny cab when you need it, it knows how to deal with criminals.

Waymo should provide a loaded shotgun in every car. It's America, after all.

/s

literally tipped a fedora

That's a trilby, not a fedora. Narrow brim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora

And they probably got upset when women chose the bear.

One of the men repeatedly made a “call me” gesture with his hand, then took his fedora off and literally tipped it at her...

It's assholes like this that make dudes in fedoras look bad. This and -you know- the hats themselves.

I'd expect the Waymo video to have captured footage of these guys. It might not be that difficult to track them, and street harassment might well qualify as assault if the DA of San Francisco were interested in prosecuting.

That said, it's telling that they freely and openly harassed a strange woman on the street once the threat of being run over was not a factor.

ETA: One short-term workaround is to tint the windows so that passengers cannot be seen from the outside, but there might be causes to harass occupied Waymo vehicles regardless of the passenger (say, to mug them). I'm curious if this is going to lead to equipping autonomous vehicles with anti-riot ordnance.

This is why driverless cars are a bad idea, they assume that everything will work as intended and everyone will play by the rules.

You need a human to make a snap decision in cases like these.

I hope these men are arrested for sexual solicitation via coercion (could be tried as attempted rape in the right state), disrupting traffic, sexual harassment, public disturbance. Fuck em, or better yet, don't fuck em, they're unfuck worthy.

What were these morons thinking? I'm sex positive as hell, I'm all for bringing back the free love of the 70's and the LSD of the 60's, but not like this, never anything like this... Hypothetically bro say you do get her number this way?

The fuck happens next?

"Hey remember me, I'm the dipshit who pressured you into giving me this number by trapping you in your car via exploitation of its safety features? So I'll pick you up at 7 for a romantic candlelit dinner and afterwards we could go see a movi..." click "Hello? Damn, friendzoned again."

Doing things like this when you're certainly being recorded is a great idea. Wait, hold on...

I love how he looks like 2 different types of douchebags when he takes his hat off!

The fedora tipping is too funny, seeing it from outside the situation, but she certainly was very scared because it's such a bizarre event.

There's enough footage etc I guess for them to be identified and arrested, wonder if that's happening

“The men came over to the car again and stood in front of it for a few minutes. Finally when they left, the car was still stalled but I clicked the ‘in car support’ on the screen and they seemed to be aware of the issue,” Amina said. “They asked if I was OK and the car began to drive towards my location. They asked if I needed police support and I said no.”

When she was almost to her destination, Waymo support called her again to ask if she was ok, she said. “I assured him that I was fine and he told me I would be given a free ride after,” she said. “After many hours I was called one last time by their support team. They asked if I was OK and told me that they have 24/7 support available. They also said I would get the next ride or next two rides (uncertain) free.”

While scary, I'm left kinda impressed by Waymo's support.

Okay, this really seems more like a case of sexual harassment, rather than harassment of Waymo customers, which was my first suspicion. Had it been the latter as part of a politically motivated action against the company I might have had a lot more sympathy, but this is disgusting…

They are quite lucky that woman was not my mother because she'd have pulled out her gun and been like, I told you to move, damnit.

I have to admit, I expected a lot worse from the style of writing. This was written like some true crime stuff lol

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Some nasty jerks they are. Well now internationally famous nasty jerks.

Too bad the cars can't realize the people are being assholes and run the fuckers over.

Edit: Might help take stupidity out of the gene pool.

The victim's statement here ends with an oddly volunteered tangent and specific praise of driverless vehicles, before it finally takes an eerie turn in the last sentence...

"...With that said, I think the Human Factor in this issue is going to be a lot harder to solve than anything else.” ....FREEZE CITIZEN!

I do hope she's okay, and those two folks seem to be clowns, but this thing also all reads as likely guerilla marketing for Waymo - who the article informs me, in a very capitalism-friendly turn of events, that they now have their service open to the public in 3 cities, cars have a safety feature that checked in with her multiple times and they "rewarded" her with an extra ride. It's a light enough "crime", with a very engineered feeling and enough to feel "real" while providing ready fodder for morning radio talk shows, Jimmy Fallon and good morning America talking heads to drone on about this morning across America as time filler that quietly advertises waymo "saving" a person from the scary outside world.

Note: Also, was very funny that throughout drafting my comment here "waymo" was constantly being autocorrected to "say no" :)

Just last week I had to run over some mother fuckers

It do be like that sometimes

This made me wonder though...the car obviously has cameras on the outside, and there's also a way to communicate with the support team from inside...so is it a stretch to think that these cars could be auto-recording everything that's happening inside the car?

Should we - as riders - have any expectation of privacy in a car with no driver?

Give it a couple of years they'll legalise running down pedestrians for self drive cars. Can't have these jackalopes affecting the bottom line

In an instance like this, our riders have 24/7 access to Rider Support agents who will help them navigate the situation in real time

Clearly that's what a human driver would do, but I guess those Rider Support Agents work for free, so why not fire the driver? /s

In the past, autonomous vehicle development dwelled on the ethical hypothetical situations like "do you hit an old lady crossing the road in order to avoid crashing into a schoolbus full of children?", but what about safety hypotheticals? Like, if you were actually driving your vehicle, there are moments when it's in your best interest to not be at a stop, such as when people are physically surrounding your car and potentially mean to cause you harm, which is extremely common in America. When does the driverless car get you out of a tight spot and run over some carjackers if need be?

Edit: To respond to everyone saying I'm full of shit, and that carjackings aren't common, there were more than 500 carjackings in NYC alone in 2021. New Orleans had 281 in 2021. 800 carjackings in Philly in 2021. 1800 carjackings in Chicago in 2021. Tell me, is that not enough carjackings to warrant asking my question?

I guess there was no way to honk?

That's gotta be the cyberpunkiest thing I've read in a while.

Let’s not call them “men” please, they lost their right to be counted amongst men with this behavior.

She could have called in-car support and they could have called the police, if the harassers didn't fuck off seeing this.

See now if she had a HUMAN driver, this would have turned out alot differently. But no, we gotta remove another career so Corporations can make more money...

Ultraviolence precursur.

we need more men willing to stand up for women.

Some guys were annoying/sexist to her while she participated in a public menace and I guess this is supposed to mean something to me beyond "stay away from California"