Passenger Leaps Out of a Waymo After Self-Driving Car Stopped on Train Tracks in Near-Miss Moment

A self-driving Waymo car turned into a deadly trap for its passenger as it began creeping along railroad tracks as a train barreled toward it, forcing the horrified rider to leap out of the moving vehicle and flee in terror.

A Jan. 7 video by a bystander caught the passenger frantically jumping from the car as it crept down light-rail tracks near Central and Southern avenues in Phoenix, Ariz., while the Valley Metro train thundered toward it, according to 12News.

Police later reported the train luckily reversed direction, and the driverless car — which uses AI, cameras and radar to drive without a human — left the scene before officers arrived.

Arizona State University technology Prof. Andrew Maynard says scary incidents like this are rare, but can happen when the automatic driving system becomes confused.

“Humans are really good at seeing a brand-new situation and trying to work out how to get around it, but Waymos don’t have that capability,” says the egghead.

“They are smarter than humans when they know the road, and they get confused when something completely blindsides them.”

That explains the Phoenix near-miss and the Waymo car’s haywire behavior because the section of tracks and nearby station were new, with construction equipment still nearby.

“The cars very intentionally follow mapped-out roads,” Maynard explains. “They’re good if there’s, say, road works there, but not so good if there’s been a structural change to the road setup.”

The professor says Waymo has a group of people for emergencies when the driverless car goes bonkers.

“Waymo will react very fast if they see an issue like this,” he says. “They will look at the software, work out where the bugs are, where they need to update it, and they will push an update out very fast indeed.”

Meanwhile, in December, a Waymo vehicle carrying a passenger had a near-miss when it suddenly swerved into oncoming traffic.

And sources say cops ended up in a funny situation in September when a Waymo vehicle was pulled over for making an illegal U-turn and they wanted to give it a ticket.

“Our citation books don’t have a box for ‘robot’ [driver],” chuckles an officer.