Waymo passengers trapped by their own safety code as anti-tech attacker circles the car
The promise was simple: tap the app, sink into the back seat, and let the algorithm handle San Francisco’s chaos. Instead, Doug Fulop spent six minutes locked inside a Waymo while a stranger screamed ‘I’ll kill you’ and tried to pry the doors open with a key.
The lockdown logic no one asked for
Fulop and two friends had left a party in the Richmond shortly after midnight. The Jaguar I-Pace rolled up, doors opened, they climbed in. Thirty seconds later a man stepped off the curb, planted himself inches from the bumper, and refused to move. The car’s pedestrian shield—an ultrasonic bubble designed to avoid even a scratch—slammed the brakes, killed the motor, and dead-bolted the doors. No override on the rider app, no manual latch inside. Waymo’s help line confirmed the grim protocol: if a human stays within the sensor perimeter, the vehicle treats itself as a crime scene.
Outside, the protester—sober, coherent, according to Fulop—cycled through every anti-automation grievance: job-stealing robots, lithium mines, the death of driving culture. Then the tone shifted. He yanked on a door handle, produced a metal key, and began scraping the paint while shouting specifics about ending the lives of the ‘cowards’ inside. Fulop dialed 911; the dispatcher already had three similar calls from the block that month.
Inside the cabin, the air tasted metallic. The women in the back seat held hands. Waymo’s remote operator stayed on the line, voice calm, repeating the same line: ‘We’re monitoring.’ Fulop’s iPhone battery dropped to 12 %; the car’s own telemetry showed police still 1.4 miles away. A neighbor walking a dog finally yelled at the aggressor; the distraction created a two-meter gap. The Jaguar registered the void, unlocked itself, and glided away like nothing happened.
A pattern the company calls ‘rare’
Waymo logs 150,000 driverless miles a week in San Francisco. Katherine Barna, head of public affairs, calls the Fulop incident ‘an anomaly’ and points to a 0.08 % intervention rate. But anomaly is a moving target: since state regulators opened the floodgates in 2020, the city has recorded 78 verbal attacks on autonomous vehicles, 12 instances of window-smashing, and three tire-slashings. Each time, the cars froze exactly as designed, turning the safety cage into a fishbowl.
Amina Green, a novelist in Noe Valley, captured two men on video last October pounding her empty Waymo at a red light; the car waited obediently for green while they shattered the front camera. Ander Sorman-Nilsson, a futurist from Sydney, watched five guys box in his robotaxi on Sunset Boulevard, laughing as they pressed faces against the glass. The common denominator: passengers powerless, code prioritizing liability avoidance over immediate escape.
The California Public Utilities Commission is reviewing a petition from disability-rights groups arguing that mandatory door-locking violates fire-safety statutes. Waymo counters that releasing manual latches would invite liability if a rider steps into traffic. The standoff means more nights like Fulop’s are baked into the roadmap.
He still uses the service—parking in the Mission is worse than PTSD—but now sits behind the driver’s seat, hand hovering over the window button, ready to crawl out if the algorithm decides the city still belongs to humans.