SF Waymo Rider’s Viral Video Shows Men Blocking Her Car to Demand Her Number

San Franciscans have gotten fairly used to seeing driverless vehicles cruising in the lane next to them, but a viral video of a woman trapped in a Waymo by two men demanding her phone number is raising new concerns about passenger safety in the autonomous vehicles.

The woman, who identified herself as Amina V., posted the video of her frightening experience in the front passenger seat of a Waymo stalled on Mission Street after a man approached it at a red light.

“Warning to women in SF,” she wrote Monday in a post on social media platform X accompanying the minute-long video, which shows two men standing in front of the car and gesturing to her, requesting her phone number. Amina asks them to move repeatedly, saying, “Get out of the way” and “Please stop. You’re holding traffic.”

She said via email that the whole exchange lasted a few minutes, during which a message appeared on the vehicle’s internal display that said something along the lines of “We will help you shortly.”

Amina said Waymo’s team reached out to her numerous times during and following the incident.

Waymo said in an email that “the trust and safety of our riders and community is our top priority, and we promptly connected with the rider to ensure their well-being.”

“In an instance like this, our riders have 24/7 access to Rider Support agents who will help them navigate the situation in real-time and coordinate closely with law enforcement officers to provide further assistance as needed,” Waymo said.

The company added that these situations are “exceedingly rare,” noting that it records about 100,000 rides a week in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Amina’s experience is the second video of a San Francisco Waymo ride gone wrong to circulate in the past few weeks. Another video picked up by TikTok users shows a man and his dog in a stalled Waymo as two people tag the vehicle with markers.

Amina said that before she started filming, one of the two men in her video approached the vehicle and stood in front of it while she was stopped at a red light. He left and returned with a second man, and the two of them demanded her number.

She said she was “afraid more men would crowd around, which thankfully didn’t happen.”

After the men moved, the car remained stalled, and Amina clicked an “in-car support” button.

“They seemed to be aware of the issue. They asked if I was OK, and the car began to drive towards my location. They asked if I needed police support, and I said no,” she said.

When she was nearing her destination, the support team called again to ask her if she was OK. She said she was in a rush to get to her hair appointment, which she was now running late to because of the incident, but assured them that she was fine. They reached out again hours later and let her know she would receive at least one free ride.

Amina said she is a fan of autonomous vehicles and might ride in one again despite the experience. She said she has anxiety about driving due to a serious car accident as a child and has been looking forward to this kind of technology for years.

How Waymo and other autonomous vehicle companies deal with “the human factor,” though, could be difficult, she told KQED.

“On Waymo’s side of things — they can encourage the cars to avoid driving in the Tenderloin or certain areas of SOMA. Having lived in SF for a while, I know that certain areas have a higher amount of people running in the streets, which would probably increase incidents like this happening,” she said.