Waymo passenger nearly misses his flight after car drives in circles

The robotaxi looped a parking lot about eight times until Waymo support remotely pulled the car over.

A Los Angeles tech entrepreneur found himself trapped in a self-driving taxi last month on his way to the airport, with the car repeatedly circling around a parking lot. Mike Johns posted a video on LinkedIn in which he was headed to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. Johns was still able to catch his flight but was left dizzy and frustrated by the experience with the taxi from Waymo, the self-driving car arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo said the incident caused a five-minute delay. Johns told CNN on Monday that this wasn’t his first driverless taxi and wanted to give the service another shot for his ride to the airport. “It went into its first loop, second loop. What’s going on? I feel like I’m being pranked,” he said. By the fourth loop, he was starting to feel dizzy because it was a small, concentrated area. He wrote on LinkedIn that the car drove in eight circles. Johns said he didn’t contact customer support on his own. He said Waymo recognized the issue and contacted him through the car’s system. In the video, a Waymo employee is heard saying they called because of a notification that the car “might be experiencing some routing issue.”