Empty Waymo Robotaxi Can't Escape a Roundabout

Last month, the folks at Wired shadowed a Waymo robotaxi for an entire workday to "study its movements, its relationship to life on the streets, its whole self-driving gestalt." It's a good thing they didn't track this recently spotted vehicle, because it would've been a dizzying ride. Jalopnik reports on a tweet from last week that shows one of Waymo's autonomous cars in a palm-tree-studded location, circling a traffic roundabout over and over again. "Sorry I'm late, my WAYMO did 37 laps in the roundabout," the person who posted the video wrote.

The video is only a few seconds long, so we don't get to see all three dozen or so laps. A Waymo rep tells TechCrunch there were no passengers in that particular vehicle and that the company has already sent out a software update to its fleet to address whatever issue may have caused the glitch. Waymo hasn't yet offered what may have led to this "strange behavior," the outlet notes. Both Jalopnik and TechCrunch cite other examples of Waymo vehicles gone wild, including a bunch of them that started honking at each other over the summer in a San Francisco parking lot. (More robotaxi stories.)