Just what I ve heard : Woman finds out the hard way what happens if you try to grab the steering wheel in a driverless vehicle

Get the Full StoryLet me first establish that we re not talking about driverless vehicles in terms of regular cars that are simply parked and are not being driven by someone. No, we re talking about self-driving robot cars that, for some reason, have a steering wheel that you are not allowed to touch. Maybe there s a manual mode on these cars, the presence of which I would assume has offensive implications to robotkind. Anyway, Waymo the folks behind these driverless vehicles don t particularly like it when you touch the steering wheel of their robotaxis. Just ask TikTok s kenziritotheburrito, who faced the wrath of Waymo s customer service team after ostensibly doing such a thing ostensibly, because Kenzie left no evidence . kenziritotheburrito Just what ive heard ha ha .. original sound Kenzie Mac In this quick, 28-second PSA, Kenzie dutifully informs us what may or may not happen if you re ever getting a ride from one of Waymo s robotaxis, and you decide to indulge a bit of mischief by grabbing the steering wheel. Allegedly, the car will pull over and dial a Waymo support team member, who will then demand to know why you, the customer, grabbed the steering wheel. This, preceding a warning of a lifetime ban from Waymo if you ever touch the steering wheel again, assuming you can convince them that your grabbing of the wheel was a total accident. Commenters proved to be an eclectic bunch, with some sharing their own stories about Waymo s ruthless customer support team, and others wondering why on Earth someone would step into a driverless vehicle in the first place. Others still lamented the lack of a Waymo service in their own cities; oh, the novel bedlam one could cause by messing with a robotaxi. Back to the point of total accidents, though, there s understandable anxiety attributed to the idea of self-driving cars, but Waymo makes a good case for them. Though services only exist in the American cities of Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin at the moment, the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association notes that, across an accumulative seven million Waymo robotaxi miles, there was an 85 percent decrease in vehicular collisions causing injury. A 57 percent reduction in police-reported crashes was observed as well. So, does this mean self-driving cars are the future? Well, who can really say? On the one hand, you d never have to run the risk of having a creepy cab driver make comments about your body on the way to work or fall asleep on the job , and should self-driving cars ever find their way to the dealership market, families would have a much easier time managing the dizzying logistics of life. On the other hand, we have no way of knowing what sort of power the tech companies and artificial intelligences of the world are going to look like in the coming decades, to say nothing of how society will function assuming it still does by then. Indeed, maybe the downsides of self-driving cars are ones that we simply cannot anticipate right now, and so we re probably better off relearning how to treat one another as human beings before we surrender to an era of apathetic automation.

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