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Phoenix police pulled over a car driving the wrong way only to discover that it was a driverless vehicle.
Bodycam footage captured the officer approaching the Waymo car just after 11am on June 19, admitting, “There’s no driver.”
Still, he went to the vehicle’s driver’s window and said: “Hi.” This prompted the car’s system to robotically respond: “Connecting to rider support.”
After connecting to a support rep, the officer said: “Your car here drove into oncoming lanes of traffic.”
The self-driving car went into “opposing lanes of traffic” in a construction area, “which is real bad,” the officer explained.
A passerby then approached the pulled-over vehicle and tells the officer: “I couldn’t help but come over here just out of morbid curiosity. I thought maybe there was a passenger.”
The officer replied, “You know the construction here? It was going eastbound in the westbound lanes, which is real bad. So I light it up and it takes off in the intersection.” The officer then laughed.
The Waymo support representative then said he would review video footage of the alleged incident.
Waymo told The Independent in a statement that the driverless vehicle “encountered inconsistent construction signage and briefly entered an unoccupied oncoming lane of traffic.” The car was then “blocked from navigating back into the correct lane” for about 30 seconds.
“In an effort to clear the intersection, the Waymo vehicle proceeded forward a short distance and pulled into the next available parking lot,” the statement read, adding that the traffic stop lasted “approximately one minute.”
No one was cited in the incident, police confirmed to The Independent.
