This is both hilarious and annoying.
Waking up in a Waymo comes as a shock.
Ditto Kasendar remembers soft music drifting from the robotaxi’s speakers as he rode home late at night from a friend’s birthday party last year. The next moment, Los Angeles firefighters were opening the door and asking if he was OK.
His six-minute trip had ended nearly an hour before. A remote Waymo assistant, dialing in through the car’s speakers, repeatedly tried to rouse him and finally called 911 when he wouldn’t stir.
“I was like, ‘Oh my god, what happened?’” said Kasendar, 30, an interior designer.
Kasendar’s robocab nap was, unfortunately, not an isolated incident.
As companies like Alphabet Inc. and Tesla Inc. bring self-driving taxis to more cities, the messier aspects of serving unpredictable humans are becoming harder to ignore. Passengers are falling asleep, spilling drinks, dropping food, vomiting, experiencing medical emergencies and, in at least two instances, giving birth in the cars. They stumble out of the vehicles and forget to close the doors, forcing the operators to pay nearby gig workers to do it.
These seemingly minor nuisances are becoming a drain on municipal resources and complicating the rollout of robotaxi service.
So many robotaxi customers have nodded off in the midst of a ride that Austin police and firefighters even have a name for the incidents: “sleepers.” The Texas capital recorded 99 such calls in Waymo’s first nine months of service there, said Roger Patterson, a commander with Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
If tired or wasted passengers fall asleep in a traditional taxi or rideshare, the driver can shout or shake them awake. Not so in a robotaxi. Remote assistants monitoring the cars try talking through the speakers and checking on passengers with interior cameras. But if they get no response, company protocols often require them to call 911. And first responders have to assume the worst.
Austin dispatchers treat an incident as a potential heart attack if the remote assistant can’t tell whether the passenger is breathing, Patterson said. In the end, only about 3% of such calls require taking the passenger to a hospital, he said. But the incidents tie up personnel who might be needed elsewhere.
“We don’t want to commit a significant number of resources to these calls when, statistically, we know that most of the time, these people do not need further medical treatment,” Patterson told an Austin City Council meeting in April. “These calls are very resource-heavy.”
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Tom Dwiggins, fire chief of a Phoenix suburb served by Waymo, said the companies need to standardize their procedures so first responders won’t have to guess how to immobilize vehicles, open car doors and contact remote assistants in an emergency.
“We would love to see one standard approach across the board,” said Dwiggins, with the Chandler, Ariz., fire department. “If you expect a firefighter in a four-minute response to look up research, try to figure out which vehicle it is, what type of platform it’s on, what company — that’s not going to happen.”
The issue of gross humans creating biohazards in these unsupervised vehicles has come up before. I think the robotaxi companies have figured out a few things since then, but you should keep in mind that there’s always a game of chance with them. The bigger issue is the sleepers, though we don’t have any firm numbers outside of Austin. I think Fire Chief Dwiggins has the right idea, and the way to achieve it is simple enough: A federal law or regulation that mandates a standard approach across the industry, which can then be easily documented for and implemented by every emergency service around the country. And we all know, that ain’t happening under this administration. I can’t say it would be a top priority for the next Democratic trifecta – Lord knows, they will have their hands full – but it’s at least something one could push for. Until then, if you must ride in one of these things, please try to stay awake. The EMS crew that will not be sent to wake you up at your destination thanks you.
Do they still have airsickness bags on planes? I suppose they are going to have to equip these taxis with barf bags. I don’t know if the passenger is able to command the vehicle to pull over and stop so they can get rid of all those watermelon martinis.