Self driving cars are a new technology that makes a lot of people nervous. For it to succeed those nerves need to be acknowledged and settled. This is life and death for the business and technology!
Also, Waymo's customers (and really all of us sharing the road with them) are very much providing Waymo a huge service as early beta testers. They need to be treated extremely well right now. It is not the time for Waymo to be trying to keep things quiet, dismissing concerns, and making half assed restitution for problems. Again, This is life and death for the technology and your company, Waymo! Every bit as important as the engineering work you are doing. Please don't screw this up
In the earliest days the lost and found was 7 days a week with highly permissive hours for a manned desk at the depot.
Then one day it became weekdays-only, but with a still large window.
Then one day the window for pick up got broken up into a few smaller windows throughout the day.
Now with the larger Bay Area expansion they did switch to automated lockers, but if you're unfortunate enough in SF specifically, your belongings now end up in a locker an hour away from from the city...
The parent company, Alphabet, is valued over four trillion dollars.
The proper response would have been: "oh, terribly sorry for the inconvenience, we'll immediately turn it around, wait there".
If that was somehow actually possible, the next response should have been: "Oh, sorry that is impossible because of [actual reason X], we are terribly sorry for the inconvenience, where are you going to be staying, we'll immediately pack and ship it all to you FedEx".
Instead, they do this petty crap.
I'm no lawyer, but as soon as someone takes off with my stuff, that sounds like theft. Sure, I willingly put it in the trunk, but it was on a contract that they would deliver me and my luggage to the destination. Refusing to allow me to retrieve it, then requiring me to come get it is just outrageous.
At the very least, instead of offering the rider two rides to come fetch his stuff that they drove off with, would be to deliver it to his home at a time convenient to him.
This tells me the company is run by a bunch of greedy losers. Not anyone with whom I might want to associate or do business.
Really disappointing
But they certainly have lawyers. No one feeding on this outrage bait seems to see the actual problem: If there's a mechanical or electrical problem that's preventing the trunk from opening, sending the car back to you won't fix that. As for delivering his luggage, I'm sure there are other liabilities they'd be exposing themselves to if they did that. Giving him a free trip to pick it up is the best option they had.
I expect it's not theft. In England the intent requirement is famously "permanently to deprive" and so any situation where you're getting it back isn't theft. Doubtless the US has slightly different rules but I don't think that'll be theft.
That is exactly the Tesla strategy, and it seems to work well for them. Though Waymo doesn't have a daily PR disaster to distract like Musk.
I think the person should report this to either the California DMV or CPUC, as well as the local airport authority.
For autonomous vehicles, I think people need to ‘normalize’ leaving one of the doors open until all people & cargo are out of the vehicle. The vehicle may complain, but it’s not going to drive off.
1. Get out. 2. Leave the door open. 3. Open the trunk. 4. Get stuff. 5. Close the trunk. 6. Close the door that I left open.
I've had enough stupid stuff happen in a Waymo. I'm not going to leave it to faith that it won't drive off with my laptop, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260502234729/https://sfist.com...
Brought up in a low-trust env and this became habitual.
That seems... reasonable? They're not saying "come at your own expense" but giving him a ride there and back.
The fact he mad this mistake, then went to the news media to broadcast his bad decision making is embarrassing.
I bet he finds himself the victim of bad situations all the time and doesn't know why
My guess would be the Jaguar's CAN bus being the weak link
My last two trunk-use rides have had closed trunks on arrival.
Suppose they sent it back to you, and the trunk still doesn't open. Now what?
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/waymo-is-paying-doordash-gig...
Waymo should have white-gloved this and sent Larry Page himself to deliver the luggage. This is horrible PR. Airlines will send you their luggage if misplaced. One day Waymo will drive-off with your toddler and ask you to file for adoption if you want them back.
That's because airlines often have their own cargo/courier service which they can easily use for delivery; and everyone knows that even those lose packages at a nonzero rate.
One day Waymo will drive-off with your toddler and ask you to file for adoption if you want them back.
Your failed attempt at outrage sensationalism didn't help your argument.
Fair enough. If there was, they already blew it. The proper response then was to say: "We apologize, there is some mechanical or electrical problem that prevented the trunk from opening, we parked the car and failed to fix it remotely, so we must bring it back to the depot. How can we best arrange to get your luggage to you?"
>>Giving him a free trip to pick it up is the best option they had.
No, they have many options to deliver his luggage.
>> I'm sure there are other liabilities they'd be exposing themselves to if they did that.
If so, this is a problem solved more than a half-century ago by the airlines. And there is no more liability than them holding onto it.
The standard airline practice has been as long as I can remember, if they can't get it to you at the airport within two hours, they will drive it to you wherever you are at your destination or home. I've had, or watched friends on the same trip have, lost luggage delivered multiple times across multiple decades, sometimes a half-hour drive from the airport, and sometimes 3+hour drives up into the mountains to deliver it. Across multiple countries.
Waymo could use any of the airline luggage services, FedEx, a courier, or multiple other options.
This was straight-up, zero question, Waymo's fault. Waymo/Alphabet has sufficient assets even cash on hand that hiring a premium white-glove concierge service to personally deliver it on a private jet would not even show up as a rounding error in their budget or accounting. Not that such a service is necessary, but it is obviously possible without question.
Moreover, the difference in publicity between what they did and hiring such a service would be worth far more than the service. Instead of multiple articles about how they basically told the customer "FU, it's your problem, take your time to fix it" and multiple discussions damaging their reputation, there could be the opposite, we'd be discussion how "They had this edge-case problem, and look how they went to make it right for the guy; we can trust them". Even if they spent $50k on white-glove private jet service, it would buy them 10X that marketing value.
It is obvious no one at Waymo is thinking.
That is indeed convenient. But not quite as convenient as having your own self-driving cars you can use for delivery.
Customer trust is a lot easier to lose than it is to gain. Moments of frustration are the perfect time to step up and prove to the customer that they can trust you to make things right.
Puzzling because trunk open sensor is already a thing and making sure it’s triggered after a ‘open trunk’ command is issued is not exactly rocket science:)
Waymo's own systems are sending the current volume and HVAC settings to the OEM CAN bus every tick (presumably because the HMI's traffic is very low priority and may not be delivered on their network), maybe the trunk release doesn't tolerate repeat activations because of some quirk?
At that point obviously I'm guessing a bit, but the fact this issue has been prominent for so long makes me think there's some platform-specific quirk that's making it more complicated than it looks from the outside
Are they willing to take the risk of it getting lost or damaged?
For example I once left a laptop on a train when travelling to my mother's house for Xmas. At the time my mother still lived where I grew up, at the edge of Metro-land, and so of course most people on that train wouldn't steal a laptop, they probably earn more than the laptop was worth in a day's work. But I stepped off the train with my other belongings, realised as I walked away and it's too late. The train operating company is under no obligation to like, stop the train and bring back my laptop right? It's unfortunate, but it's not on purpose. A week later I picked it up from their main hub. Their behaviour was entirely reasonable.
If you're thinking that this rule about theft means some crimes aren't theft then yeah, the most notable example in English culture is the crime of "joyriding" which is when you take somebody's car and you drive that around for a while and then you just get out and run off. That's not theft because, as we saw, no intent permanently to deprive (because it destroys evidence like fingerprints some joyriders might torch the car, but that would be intent permanently to deprive). So the crime of "Taking Without Owner's Consent" or TWOC was invented for cars and there's a fun rabbit hole you can disappear down as crooks take like boats and other things and the exact wording of that law is interpreted by courts as to whether it's TWOC if you took a bicycle, or a rowboat, or...