Passengers in a so-called driverless taxi shared a wild moment in San Francisco when the car went rogue and tried to power down a pedestrian path. Robotaxis have had their own little reign of terror over the California city for the last few years. Thankfully, no one was injured in this recent incident caught on camera earlier this month.
The video opens with the robotaxi suddenly taking a hard right, erratically forcing the vehicle towards a pedestrian on the sidewalk. Three passengers on the backseats start screaming like they just saw a jump scare in a horror movie. The caption on TikTok sums up the situation perfectly, “When ‘Going out out’ turned into ‘seeing your life flash before your eyes in a driverless Uber.’”
The driverless car detected that it was trying to travel down a footpath and reversed back onto the road. The only issue was that it was backing up into a busy intersection. The camera wipe pans out each of the side windows to show that the robotaxi was blocking a bus on one side and a wave of traffic on the other. One of the passengers shouts, “I don’t want to be a beta tester in this situation.”
The robotaxi could have easily reversed into the path of a car moving at speed. Then, the driver of the other car would be put in a position of expecting someone to be ridiculously backing up into an intersection. It’s just a recipe for disaster. These vehicles have been stopping suddenly and causing traffic jams across the city. A Cruise vehicle was even involved in a hit-and-run.
Despite claims that software will eventually be better drivers than humans, programming is often the exact opposite of what you would hope a real driver would do. Ideally, drivers behave predictably so that everyone around them can react to their actions safely.