We’ve seen Waymo’s fleet of autonomous taxis cause plenty of mayhem on public streets. They like to ignore bike lanes, drive the wrong way down busy roads, and even rely on remote workers in the Philippines when they get stumped.

Riding them can also quickly turn into a terrifying near-death experience, as one couple in San Francisco found out firsthand. As CBS News reports, the couple was looking to get home in the Mission District only for their Waymo cab to veer off a highway and accelerate to terrifying speeds while driving down a construction lane.

All the while, police vehicles were trying to chase it down with sirens blaring.

“There were construction signs,” resident Elliot Slade told the broadcaster over the weekend. “There were lights going on. Police in the distance and it sped up. That’s when I looked at my fiancée, we’re done.”

“This is it,” he added. “We’re dead. We’re going to die right here in the Waymo.”

The terrifying incident underlines the very real dangers of relying on autonomous vehicles for ride shares, while they still suffer from nagging technical shortcomings that are putting people in danger. It could also further erode public trust in the tech.

In the last two months alone, Waymo’s vehicles have been observed driving through flooded streets and speeding through construction zones, as USA Today reports.

The latest incident also proved scary enough for Waymo to pull its cars from freeways in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Miami altogether as it works to “integrate recent technical learnings into our software,” according to a statement to CBS.

The offending Waymo vehicle “started freaking out,” Slade recalled, because of a slew of merging lanes, causing cars to be “all over the place.” Smartphone footage Slade recorded shows the dramatic incident from his perspective.

“Holy s***, dude,” Slade can be heard saying in the clip.

After speeding up for around 20 seconds, the Waymo eventually pulled over, with a representative chiming in over the car’s audio system. Understandably, Slade and his partner were desperate to leave and never look back.

“She came on the line and said from what I could see, it seemed like a stressful experience,” Slade told CBS. “What do you want to do next? I was like we want to get out. They’re like do you want to continue the journey; I was like absolutely not.”

Waymo offered the rattled occupant $40 worth of free rides, but understandably, he’s now unsure about climbing back into one of its vehicles.

“It was one of those things, once you lost your autonomy in the car, I don’t want to feel that again,” Slade told CBS. “Like it was a really freaky moment.”

Meanwhile, a spokesperson told the broadcaster that the company expects to resume its freeway routes “soon.”

More on Waymo: Protesters Have Figured Out They Can Block Waymos and Berate Their Passengers While the Cars Are Paralyzed

The post Waymo Pulled Its Cars From the Freeway After One Fled Police With Horrified Couple on Board appeared first on Futurism.

It turns out not even the people building Tesla’s self-driving tech trust Elon Musk’s extravagant claims about the company’s autonomous vehicles.

New reporting by Reuters interviewed nine former data labelers and a former self-driving engineer about their take on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving mode. The results were overwhelmingly negative, with seven of the data specialists admitting they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla in FSD.

“We have all seen it fail,” one Tesla insider told Reuters. “Definitely don’t trust Elon on this,” the self-driving engineer concurred, referencing Musks’ declaration that the the vehicles are ready for “safe unsupervised” rides.

One erstwhile worker told the publication they wouldn’t ride in a Tesla robotaxi “if you f**king paid me.”

At least five data labelers, whose job was to comb through hours of FSD footage to train the vehicle’s software to avoid past mistakes, told Reuters they routinely saw clips of Teslas driving above the speed limit, an issue which engineers and managers treated like a low-priority compared to edge-case issues.

Those glowing recommendations come amidst concerns that Tesla’s FSD mode may never be truly safe enough for public roads.

In recent months, Tesla operating on FSD move have driven riders into lakes, off bridges, and even into the path of oncoming trains — and those are just the incidents that get media exposure. Given these insiders’ direct access to terabytes’ worth of proprietary FSD footage, we’re inclined to take their word on it.

More on Tesla: Man Drives Cybertruck Into Lake to Test Elon Musk’s “Boat” Claims, and It Went About as Well as You’d Guess

The post Tesla Insiders Admit Self-Driving Is a Complete Disaster appeared first on Futurism.

Longtime Cybertruck watchers might remember a peculiar day back before the brutalist pickup was even released, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk randomly tweeted that the vehicle would function as a rudimentary flotation device.

“It will even float for a while,” he wrote at the time.

It wasn’t a one-off claim. Musk later boasted that the vehicle would be able to “traverse at least 100m [330 feet] of water as a boat.”

“Mostly just need to upgrade cabin door seals,” he claimed, writing at another point that the “Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that aren’t too choppy.”

The Cybertruck finally did make it to market, where it’s suffered a seemingly endless parade of recalls, embarrassing incidents, and dismal sales figures.

Unsurprisingly, all Musk’s bluster about the truck serving as a makeshift schooner turned out to be flimflam. In fact, it quickly emerged that just getting wet in a car wash could brick the thing.

To muddy the waters further, the company ended up adding what it calls “Wade Mode” to the vehicles, which sets the truck’s ride height to the highest level, ostensibly so it can ford creeks and streams.

All that mixed messaging clearly got jumbled for a Texas man, though, who activated Wade Mode and drove his Cybertruck into a lake. Unsurprisingly, things didn’t go well for him.

“Yesterday, [Grapevine Police Department] and [Grapevine Fire Department] were dispatched to Grapevine Lake, where a Tesla Cybertruck was stranded in the water,” police in Grapevine, Texas, wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. “The driver drove into the lake to use the ‘Wade Mode’ feature when the vehicle became disabled.”

Not only is the man’s vehicle swamped — as the cops showed in an amazing attached photo — but he’s in legal trouble as well.

“The passengers abandoned the vehicle and the driver was arrested,” they wrote.

More on the Cybertruck: Cybertruck Recalled to Keep Its Wheels From Flying Off While Driving

The post Man Drives Cybertruck Into Lake to Test Elon Musk’s “Boat” Claims, and It Went About as Well as You’d Guess appeared first on Futurism.