San Francisco man says he feared for his life after his Waymo entered a construction zone and sped off, prompting a highway patrol chase

Waymo has restricted freeway access for its self-driving cars after several troubling incidents, including one involving a San Francisco resident whose car drove into a construction zone. Elliot Slade said the incident happened last month, just five minutes into his trip on Highway 101, when the car started acting strangely. The car first tried to merge into other lanes, then steered straight into a construction zone and sped up.

“There were signs. There were lights. There were cones. And it went through the cones and then sped up straight away,” Slade said, according to ABC7News. A highway patrol car soon began chasing the vehicle. Slade said he felt confused and scared while sitting in the back seat of the driverless car. He recalled officers shouting, “Stop Waymo. Stop Waymo. Stop Waymo.” The car eventually left the freeway and drove into a residential neighborhood, leaving Slade and his fiancé badly shaken.

Slade said the experience made him doubt whether the technology was ready for real-world use. “In that moment it’s like, oh this technology is not ready. This is 100% not ready. If something else had gone wrong, someone in that road might have got hit. We might have crashed in the car,” he said.

Waymo recalls software after multiple incidents on Bay Area roads

These kinds of malfunctions led Waymo to recall the software running on nearly 4,000 of its vehicles. According to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were seven separate incidents on Bay Area roads in a single day last month. 

Waymo said it has identified specific areas to improve in how its cars handle construction zones, and is restricting freeway access while those updates are made. Other self-driving car safety features have also come under scrutiny, including how Tesla’s driver monitoring system can be fooled.

Other recent incidents point to ongoing problems with self-driving cars in the city. In one case, three Waymo vehicles got stuck in a standoff on a residential street after two of them appeared to collide, causing a major traffic jam. In another, San Bruno police pulled over a driverless Waymo car for making an illegal U-turn during a DUI crackdown.

Scott Moura, from the UC Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies, said better data sharing could help fix these problems. He said transportation agencies that manage construction projects are already working to feed information into data exchanges that connect directly to vehicles. 

If these systems communicate more effectively, it could help prevent cars from driving into dangerous areas without warning. Waymo’s parent company Alphabet competes in the broader electric and autonomous vehicle market, where BYD’s sharp sales surge over Tesla has reshaped competition.

For Slade, the experience has stayed with him. He took an Uber home that night and has been reluctant to use Waymo since. He has used the service once more since the incident, but said the anxiety hasn’t gone away. “I don’t want to use it again. There was a moment where even getting into it again was kind of freaky. A bit of PTSD- yeah,” he said.