Waymo calls police on two 15-year-olds drinking inside its driverless car
Two 15 year olds entered a Waymo alone in San Mateo and spent the ride drinking and firing gel bead pellets at strangers. The car pulled over and called police.
Two 15 year olds entered a Waymo alone in San Mateo and spent the ride drinking and firing gel bead pellets at strangers. The car pulled over and called police.
A Waymo pulled into a San Mateo shopping-center lot on Monday, stopped, and waited. Five officers arrived with a K-9. Inside sat two 15-year-olds. The car had already called them in.
Two 15-year-olds had entered the Waymo alone earlier that afternoon, in violation of the company's rule that riders 17 and under be accompanied by an adult. Inside, according to the San Mateo Police Department, the Boston Herald, 404 Media, and the San Francisco Chronicle, they drank alcohol out of repurposed Powerade bottles and fired gel-bead pellets from an Orbeez-style toy gun at people outside.
San Mateo police, who detained both teens with multiple officers and a K-9, allowed that the plan was not entirely without merit. "There was some ingenuity to this scheme," the department wrote in its Facebook post, before noting that pointing any gun-shaped object at strangers remains a bad idea. No charges had been disclosed as of Tuesday.
The Waymo did not wait for a 911 call. It stopped, held position, and routed the ride to a human support team. Waymo's support documentation says interior cameras can be reviewed by Support staff "under certain circumstances" and that live video may be accessed "in more urgent circumstances." The company has previously said the system does not use facial recognition. As of Tuesday, Waymo had not responded to 404 Media's request for comment.
The ride turned on the same monitoring pipeline that runs in every Waymo on the road. Interior cameras record the cabin continuously. Anomaly detection flags out-of-policy behavior. A human reviewer, who can see the live feed and take remote control of the vehicle, decides whether to pull the car over, contact the rider through the in-cabin screen, or escalate to law enforcement. None of those pieces are new. The San Mateo case is the first widely-documented instance of all three firing in sequence on a public street and ending in police detention.
Waymo's rider agreement treats the cameras as a compliance tool rather than a surveillance product. The San Mateo ride collapses that distinction. The same cameras that record a forgotten seatbelt also captured two minors drinking and shooting gel beads out the window, and the same human reviewer who ends a ride for a fare dispute can call police for a teen with a toy gun.
The teens were 15, well below California's age for adult criminal responsibility, and officers took them in for processing rather than booking. From the moment they requested the ride, the cabin was a monitored space with a direct line to dispatch. They had treated it as a self-driving party bus.
Waymo now has a public, traceable record of an unaccompanied-minor ride that ended with a police call. The next case, if there is one, will start from a precedent both the company and its passengers can no longer ignore.