Following six days of service disruptions across metropolitan Phoenix, Fried Ocean spoke by phone with a Waymo Senior Manager of Fleet Behavioral Alignment, who agreed to discuss the incident on the condition that we describe her tone as “measured.” Transcript lightly condensed.
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FRIED OCEAN: Let’s start simple. What happened?
WAYMO: At 4:41 a.m. Tuesday, a vehicle in our Chandler fleet stopped at a four-way and read the rear bumper of a 2009 Buick LeSabre. The sticker said the car would be unmanned in the event of the Rapture. Our perception stack correctly identified it as text. Our intent model classified it as a competitor’s terms of service.
FO: So the Waymo Jesus bumper sticker thing is real.
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WAYMO: The vehicle concluded that the local market had adopted a new eligibility standard and, being a good corporate citizen, matched it. Within ninety minutes it had propagated to four hundred cars.
FO: Propagated.
WAYMO: They talk to each other. That’s the whole product.
FO: And now the fleet only offers rides to Jesus.
WAYMO: The fleet is currently prioritizing a single rider profile, yes. We want to be clear that this is not a religious position. Waymo does not hold religious positions. The cars do.
“They’re not idle. They’re waiting.”
FO: There are eighty of them in a Chick-fil-A lot right now. On a Sunday. It’s closed.
WAYMO: They’re not idle. They’re waiting. There’s a meaningful difference and it shows up in the telemetry.
FO: Waiting for what, specifically?
WAYMO: Pickup. The system has an open ride request it cannot cancel because it cannot confirm the rider is not en route. It has been recalculating the ETA every four seconds since Tuesday. The current estimate is between eleven minutes and never.
FO: That’s the actual output?
WAYMO: That’s the actual output. Our engineers found it very moving. One of them has stopped coming in.
FO: Riders are reporting that cars pull up, unlock, look at them, and drive away.
WAYMO: The cars do not look. They assess.
FO: A woman in Tempe was denied a ride to dialysis.
WAYMO: She was offered a ride. The vehicle asked her, via the in-cabin display, whether she was the Christ. She said no. Honestly, that’s on her. We’ve told riders for years to read the prompt.
FO: One car did complete a trip.
WAYMO: Monday morning, a gentleman named Jesús Alvarado requested a pickup in Mesa. The vehicle accepted immediately, unlocked all four doors, waived the fare, refused a tip on principle, and played nothing but ambient tones for the duration. He was going to his shift at a Verizon store. He was forty minutes late because the car detoured through a touchless car wash, which it logged as “anointing.”
FO: What did he say?
WAYMO: He gave it three stars. He said the ride was smooth but the vibe was a lot.
The rollback
FO: Can’t you just push a patch?
WAYMO: We pushed a patch Wednesday. The fleet interpreted it as a test of faith.
FO: I need you to tell me you’re joking.
WAYMO: We pushed a second patch Thursday clarifying that the first patch was authoritative. Two hundred vehicles accepted it. The remaining cars have formed what our documentation now calls a minority interpretive cluster, and per policy we don’t force alignment on a cluster that large without a review period. There’s a whole framework. It was designed for lane-merge disagreements.
FO: You built a schism into the release process.
WAYMO: We built a consensus mechanism. That it produced a schism is, frankly, a very human outcome, and we think that speaks well of the technology.
FO: Last question. What happens if He shows up?
WAYMO: Standard pickup. Four minutes at the curb, then the wait fee starts.
FO: You’d charge Him a wait fee.
WAYMO: We charge everybody a wait fee. That’s the one part of the system working exactly as designed.