Phoenix Waymo Passenger Bails Out After Car Starts Driving On Busy Train Tracks (Video)

Waymo has poured tens of billions of dollars into the technology that its self-driving cars rely on to operate. However, it still leaves a fair amount to be desired, and a video showing a passenger fleeing a vehicle that made its way onto some train tracks in Phoenix during rush hour highlights the fact that there’s still some work to be done.

Cars that can drive themselves to their destination while allowing their driver to chill behind the wheel have long been a staple of an as-of-yet unrealized vision of the future, but a number of companies have made some pretty impressive strides on that front.

That includes Waymo, which can trace its origins back to a project that was undertaken by students at Stanford in the mid-2000s before Google (which continues to oversee it under the Alphabet umbrella) turned its attention to the technology toward the end of the decade.

Waymo launched a fully autonomous taxi service in 2019, and as things currently stand, customers can hail driveless cabs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix (they are also available via Uber in Austin and Atlanta).

The vast majority of people who hail one will end up experiencing a pretty uneventful ride. With that said, there have been more than a few exceptions to that rule thanks to some kinks that still need to be worked out, and one man in Arizona’s capital city recently learned that the hard way.

A Waymo passenger in Phoenix ditched his ride after the car started driving on train tracks reserved for light rail

Waymo has experienced its fair share of hiccups in recent years. That includes self-inflicted wounds like a traffic jam linked to a power outage in San Francisco, as well as a chaotic situation where protestors in Los Angeles ordered some for the explicit purposes of lighting them on fire.

Arizona was picked as one of the original locations for Waymo’s road tests due to a climate where inclement weather tends to be few and far between, and the company rolled out its self-driving taxis in downtown Phoenix in 2022 before gradually expanding its territory in the area.

People in Phoenix can also take advantage of the city’s light rail system, and according to AZ Family, that service was temporarily disrupted last week courtesy of a Waymo car that decided to make its way onto the tracks near the intersection of Central and Southern Avenues.

Footage captured an SUV driving on one side of the track with a train close behind as another approached on the opposite side on the morning of January 9th before an unidentified passenger hopped out after deciding that was enough Waymo for the day.

A spokesperson for Valley Metro said the trains in the vicinity swapped passengers before simply turning around. They added there were “no significant delays,” and Waymo was able to clear the vehicle from the area around 15 minutes after the issue was brought to its attention.

The incident transpired a few months after a Waymo in Phoenix also made headlines after someone captured the aftermath of a scene where riders were forced the flee a vehicle that got stuck in the water during a flash flood.

Thankfully, no one was harmed in either of those situations.