‘We’re going to die right here in the Waymo’: California pair offered $120 in free rides after robotaxi scare. What to do when driverless cars go awry

He said the AV took off at “highway speeds” through a construction lane, at which point he told his fiancée, “‘We’re going to die right here in the Waymo.’”

The police pursued and Slade felt “completely helpless” until the car stopped in a residential neighborhood. That’s when he said the human Waymo rep, who passengers have access to during rides, “came on the line” to check in on them.

Waymo offered him up to $120 in free rides following the incident, though the experience left him unsure of when he’ll feel comfortable taking a robotaxi again.

Afterward, Waymo reiterated that safety is their “top priority” and, on May 21, announced that it would temporarily halt all highway travel for its vehicles ”as we work to integrate recent technical learnings into our software.”

The question of safety with self-driving cars

While Tesla’s Cybercabs and Amazon’s Zoox, among others, have entered the AV ride-hail market, Waymo remains the nation’s largest robotaxi service.

It launched in 2018 and now boasts a fleet of 3,000 vehicles across 11 U.S. cities — with at least 20 more in the works. Last year it celebrated 20 million lifetime trips and, in February, reported a valuation of almost $130 billion.

However, questions persist about AV safety.

Two oft-quoted studies from 2024 and 2025 tout the safety of AVs versus human drivers, but they were conducted, at least in part, by researchers affiliated with Waymo.

Philip Koopman, an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who has researched AV safety for more than two decades, told Moneywise that studies like those don’t tell the whole story because they weigh heavily on stats like severe crashes per mile.

“Safety,” he said, “is much more complex than the number of crashes divided by the number of miles.”

Koopman acknowledged that “there are cases where robotaxies do better than humans in avoiding some types of crashes,” but also pointed to examples of Waymo cars driving into flooded roads, or illegally passing school buses — including 19 instances in an Austin, Texas, school district alone. Koopman argued that if incidents like those aren’t counted among the safety data — given they didn’t involve serious crashes — then the data is incomplete.

He also said that updating the systems in the cars — as Waymo often does after incidents like those with the floods and school buses — and rolling them out in new cities requires new safety data. “The old miles on an old car using different technology should not be counted in their statistical approach.”

Koopman, instead, would like to see more regulation within the AV industry, including transparency about the fixes AV companies make to their operating systems. He also believes AV cars should be held to the same standards as those that are human-driven — the operators of which would be considered poor drivers, he notes, if they pulled into flooded areas or illegally passed school buses regularly.