Waymo trap: riders locked inside as anti-tech stalker tried to pry the doors open

Doug Fulop’s Halloween ended in a six-minute panic cage on the streets of San Francisco when a stranger who “hates robots” pinned his Waymo robotaxi, jabbed a key at the door seams and screamed that everyone inside should die. The car’s own safety stack—designed to freeze if a human body is detected—turned into a prison walls while the attacker paced inches from the sensors.

The safety code that became a hostage script

At 02:14 last Saturday, Fulop and three friends summoned the white Jaguar I-Pace on Castro Street. The ride had rolled barely 300 ft when a man in a black hoodie stepped off the curb, blocked the lane and began slapping the hood. Lidar saw flesh; the autonomy stack slammed to zero km/h and dead-bolted the doors. “We’re sitting ducks,” Fulop told me, voice still cracking two days later. “The unlock button does nothing when the car thinks it’s about to hit a pedestrian.”

Inside, cellular signal held: 911 picked up in 11 seconds, Waymo support in 23. But dispatch codes mean nothing when physics is hostage to firmware. Operators repeated the same line: the vehicle will not budge until the proximity field clears. Translation: the aggressor controlled the timeline.

Outside, the stalker produced a brass key and dragged it along the passenger window, leaving a translucent scratch that will cost $1,200 to polish out. Witness video shows him shouting “Get out of the machine” before trying the handle—locked, obviously—then circling to the charge-port flap and yanking it like a petrol cap. A second bystander filmed the scene; the attacker grinned into that lens and declared, “I’m saving jobs.”

San francisco’s four-year war on driverless ghosts

The city that green-lit commercial robotaxis in 2020 has since logged 247 documented roadside confrontations: tyre-slashings, graffiti tags reading “AI = Murder”, even a flare gun fired at a Cruise Bolt last March. Most incidents never reach court; victims trade anonymity for a corporate NDA and a free ride credit. Fulop refused the hush money. “If we hide the story, the code stays dangerous,” he said.

Waymo’s post-mortem calls the lock-in “rare”. Katherine Barna, head of fleet communications, insists the protocol saved the group from a possible low-speed collision. She points to 14 million autonomous miles with only three injury crashes—statistics that mean little when you are breathing condensation inside a glass box while a stranger debates your mortality.

Yet Saturday is not an outlier. In September writer Amina Green posted dash-cam footage of two men pounding her robotaxi at a red light on Mission; she locked eyes with the lead assailant while the car refused to run the red. Weeks earlier, strategist Ander Sorman-Nilsson counted five aggressors in Los Angeles who forced his Waymo to halt, then hammered the windows in sync like a metronome. Each time, the vehicle’s own caution became the weapon.

Regulators have no rule for malice

The California Public Utilities Commission mandates collision reporting, but zero protocol covers “intentional human obstruction”. DMV filings show Waymo petitioned last year for an override that lets riders force creep-mode at 2 mph when stationary more than 30 seconds; the request is still “under review”. Meanwhile, the firmware that prioritises liability avoidance over passenger autonomy remains untouched.

Fulop, a former Google product manager, now carries a window-shattering rescue hammer in every rideshare. “Irony is I helped build the culture that built this car,” he laughed, without humour. His review on the Waymo app ended with a single line: “Five stars for silence when I needed control.”

The Halloween incident logged no arrests; SFPD says “investigations continue”, code for footage lost in a queue. Waymo has offered counselling and lifetime rides; Fulop wants a code patch instead. Until then, every rider climbs into a sleek white algorithmic vault whose most sophisticated feature is the ability to keep you safe by keeping you trapped. The future, it turns out, comes with child-locks for adults—and the key sits in the hand of whoever hates the machine most.