My guess is that the car is looking for a place to pull over (perhaps because the rider pressed the "pull over" button. In this mode, the car hugs the right side of the road until it can find a spot to stop, which would normally work alright, except in this one particular spot where the "right side of the road" is only this tiny island.<p>So the car just circles around it indefinitely.
It's easy enough to imagine an actual emergency which would necessitate remote or local intervention to stop the car, and the call seems to indicate that they don't have an emergency override or at least not without escalation.<p>What if there were a:<p>medical emergency of the passenger<p>crash up ahead<p>fire up ahead<p>earthquake<p>flood<p>malfunction of the driverless car<p>really anything that would make you pull over your actual car to the side of the road for your own safety or emergent needs.<p>And then you have to imagine if so, even with an e-stop button are you in a less safe situation if you do not have ability to reach the wheel from the back seat.<p>Those are concerns that would give me pause.
I usually think it's a stretch when people compare new tech to old sci-fi stories, but "brilliant machine just runs in circles endlessly and nobody can stop it" is straight out of I, Robot.
So the guy is in the car and he's concerned about catching his flight but when the operator asks him to do something in the waymo app he doesn't want to do it. Could it be that he'd rather keep filming for internet notoriety than stop filming and actually solve his problem?
Can we please get some clarification on "trapped" from someone who's used a Wayno? Surely the driverless car hasn't locked him inside. Right?<p>Surely every driverless vehicle ought to have a button that when pressed gracefully stops the car so the passengers can safely exit.
This is wild! Wow! I used to think highly of Waymo but this could be the worst possible way to handle a situation where a 2-ton object went awry.<p>She should have stopped the car <i>immediately</i> after she became aware of the situation, within the first few seconds of the call. She kept following this dumb scripted conversation as if it was someone calling support because their router won't turn on. What an absolute shit display of incompetence and recklessness.
Obligatory sci-fi reference: "Road Stop" by David Mason:<p><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61309/61309-h/61309-h.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61309/61309-h/61309-h.htm</a>
Yeah, this happened to me at home. I have this lock on the door and I couldn’t get in because it was locked. I called support and they said I needed to use the key on the lock but that SHOULDN’T BE NECESSARY. Completely unsafe that the door wouldn’t unlock. Shelter is a human right and I was trapped outside of my house just because I wouldn’t use some “device” that so-called “support” was trying to get me to use.<p>Same situation as this guy and the “End Ride” button. It’s actually horrifying.