San Francisco. Fourth of July.
People were out. Drinking, cheering, setting things off. The kind of chaos the city knows too well. One Waymo, carrying two passengers, rolled into the thick of it.
Boom.
Not an explosion, really. Just the sound of a robot taxi crushing a lit firework on the sidewalk near an intersection. Illegal fireworks everywhere. The car didn’t stop. It didn’t swerve. It just… kept going.
Passengers filmed it. You can see the confusion in their eyes. Rose Peterson was in the back seat with her fiancé. She said it was terrifying. Makes sense. You don’t plan for your self-driving car to incinerate fireworks while navigating cross traffic.
“The more me and my fiancé were talkin about it…” Peterson told ABC7.
Something bad could have happened. To them. To the people lighting the sparks. To the guy walking his dog next door. It was close. Really close.
At one point, someone in the back yelled: “Are we on fire dude?”
A good question. The answer? No. No one burned. The car wasn’t destroyed. But the image stays with you.
A Waymo rep later said the company checked in on the riders. Standard stuff. “Committed to safety.” “Earning trust.”
We take situations like this seriously and are committing to evaluating and learning from these event
Safe words. Empty air. The firework went pop under the tires anyway.
But wait. It wasn’t just fireworks that broke things.
Across the city, other Waymo cars died. Not from pyrotechnics. Just… traffic. They stalled. Power cut. Engines quiet. Drivers got trapped inside their autonomous capsules for hours, sitting in gridlock, waiting for tow trucks that couldn’t reach them because, well. Gridlock.
The irony?
The city that built these cars still can’t move through it without them shutting down. Fireworks didn’t break Waymo that weekend. The infrastructure did. Or didn’t. Hard to tell when the cars themselves just give up and die.
