You’ve probably seen a driverless Waymo taxi roaming around your city for the past couple of years. They’re difficult to miss.
They’re the cars that look like g-g-ghooosts are driving them. By all accounts, they are relatively safe drives considering there’s no one physically moving them. Though if you saw a particular video that went viral this past weekend, you would think otherwise.
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The footage showed a Waymo self-driving car casually driving through a golf course filled with perplexed golfers hoping not to get hit as the car slowly crept across the green. Waymo cars have a history of, to put it mildly, getting confused.
Way back in January, I wrote about a guy who got trapped in a Waymo that wouldn’t stop circling a parking lot. It just kept looping around over and over again, as a man recorded himself reacting to the absurdity of it all.
Everyone Thought a Waymo Drove Onto a Golf Course—It Was Just a Guy Driving
There is an established history of these things going bonkers, but Waymo clarified to Futurism that this was not one of those instances. Via email, Waymo told Futurism’s Victor Tangermann that a human was actually driving the rogue robotaxi.
It was a part of a concert series event at L.A.’s Penmar Golf Course, and the car was being driven across the course by a flesh-and-blood human being—likely to be shown off as a display model.
Still, you’d be forgiven for assuming this was just another Waymo freakout. While Waymo is clearly the market leader in the self-driving taxi space, they are not without incident. It’s not just one guy trapped in a driverless car doing donuts in a parking lot.
Waymo cars have hit cyclists and have even done damage to their own kind by running over delivery robots. What a bizarre world we live in.
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