Women scream as self-driving Waymo car heads into oncoming traffic toward them

TEMPE, Ariz. (KPHO/Gray News) — In a video going viral on TikTok, two Arizona women spotted a self-driving Waymo headed toward them going the wrong way down the street.

The incident happened last week near Rural Road and Apache Boulevard in Tempe — a busy spot, right near the Arizona State campus.

At first, the women thought the Waymo looking confused was funny but then realized the situation was serious.

Recent ASU grads Aiselyn Anaya-Hall and Emmie Wuest say they thought they might get into a crash with a Waymo.

“Oh look, a Waymo. Oh look, it’s crossing the street. And then oh look, it is pulling into the wrong way,” said Wuest, who was driving her car when the two witnessed the incident.

The fully autonomous Waymo car offers driverless rides to thousands of people in the area every day.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, we might actually get hit here,’” Wuest said.

The two say they saw a man in the enger seat of the Waymo car heading into oncoming traffic.

“He couldn’t do anything. He just kinda put his hands up. You can’t really see it in the video,” said Hall, who took the viral video.

Both Hall and Wuest are familiar with Waymo having taken rides in one before.

“I used to feel safe going on Waymos, and now I am like, never again,” Wuest said. “No one died, this time.”

Andrew Maynard, a professor of Advanced Technology Transitions at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at ASU, said he uses Waymo often and disagrees with their assessment of the danger.

“Just driving in today, I turned onto campus and there was a car driven by a human coming straight towards me, which just illustrates that humans make stupid mistakes all the time on roads. So do Waymos,” Maynard said.

“They are always on point. They are not like humans that are always looking at their phones, eating, listening to music. They are hyper-aware of their surroundings,” he said.

The professor said so far, the data shows Waymos are safer than human drivers.

“Waymo at the moment is offering 100,000 trips a week,” he said. “That is a tremendous number of cars without a driver. Of course, you are going to have the off occasion where they do weird things. But it is a fraction of the trips that are being driven.”

A Waymo spokesperson responded to the incident, saying:

“The trust and safety of the community is our top priority. The Waymo Driver was proceeding through an intersection when the light changed, and the vehicle rerouted its course by making a right turn, safely clearing the intersection within a minute. We continuously refine our system’s performance to navigate complex scenarios while prioritizing community safety.”

Waymo clarified that a “Waymo driver” just means the car driving itself. It did not have a human operating the car when this happened.

The women who witnessed everything said they posted the video online as a way to tell people to be careful around Waymos. They said they would like to see safety improvements in the future.

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