Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage | Hacker News Reader

Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage

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88 pointstoss170 comments

The way this has apparently been handled saddens me. I worked for Cruise, a Waymo competitor. A Cruise vehicle famously had a very unfortunate accident and Cruise government relations employees famously tried to cover up the worst details when reporting it to the CA DMV. Of course the cover-up was discovered and guess what? Cruise lost their license and not long after lost all their funding and shut down.

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

It is also literally insanely hostile for Waymo to respond like this.

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

> I'm no lawyer, but as soon as someone takes off with my stuff, that sounds like theft.

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.

In England, can I take someone's belongings and extort them to pay for "shipping and handling" fees or compel them to go out of their way to some risky nondescript location to pick it up? Wonder what the crime in this case if it's "not theft".

That would probably be a Blackmail offence, the intent requirement is about gain (to you) or loss (to the other party) and there's a bunch of Reasonableness invocations because it depends whether the prosecutor can make out that a Reasonable person should know they aren't entitled to ask that you do this to get your property back, as of course one can gain (or the other party may lose) in a reasonable transaction.

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...

The U.S. has very different rules. Just yesterday there was an incident in my town where a couple of guys drove a car out of a parking lot, then later drove it back to the parking lot where they were apprehended and arrested for theft.

We shouldn't mistake "You can be accused of a crime" for you committed that crime, especially in the US. Ask James Comey.

non sequitur

I'm no lawyer

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.

>> 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.

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.

Waymo has been "scaling 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...

Cruise was legendary, awesome bunch of people. I remember finding out how you guys had an angel syndicate and speaking to a few guys, hope you all are onto bigger and better things

>keep things quiet, dismissing concerns, and making half assed restitution for problems

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 am surprised the trunk didn't open, and I’m very surprised that Waymo support could not turn the vehicle around. I’ve had a Waymo alert me when I left something in the back seat; I’m surprised it did not do the same for the trunk.

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.

What happens if one were to keep leaving doors open? I wonder if they would ban you or something.

Wonder no more. They order doordashers to close the door.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/waymo-is-paying-doordash-gig...

Interesting... I wonder if getting paid for closing the door still requires you to be active enough on the platform... otherwise I imagine you'd have people signing up for DoorDash just to stand in front of popular places and "hold the door open" for people... $10-20 a pop sounds like a good hustle.

As a passenger, they probably silently black-list you if you do it to much

I think the implication was that people stand around places where waymo goes often and just hold doors open for arriving waymo's to be "helpful". When the passenger leaves they just leave the door open for their doordash friends who are nearby

They would probably start to consider installing automatic doors if enough people do it.

Pretty sure the next generation of Waymos, the Zeekr vans, have auto-closing doors.

The Ioniq 5s also got modified for automatic doors.

Any time I've loaded something into the trunk of a Waymo, it pre-emptively pops the trunk when I'm getting out _for_ me and reminds me to get my things from the trunk, so this is... surprising as a failure mode. Wondering if there was some issue with the latch/opening system, because it's definitely programmed to work the right way. (Or he tossed his stuff into the trunk from the main cabin, but... it's a pretty low hatch ceiling there.)

Not that surprising if the thing that failed was the thing that notices whether or not you put something in the trunk in the first place. Unless it does that routine at the end of every ride, regardless of whether it thinks something is in the trunk or not, then it's not a fail safe system and occasional mishaps like this should be expected at scale.

Over hundreds rides I've found it's extremely flakey on if the trunk will open again at dropoff after opening it earlier.

My guess would be the Jaguar's CAN bus being the weak link

> My guess would be the Jaguar's CAN bus being the weak link

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:)

Besides the CAN bus there's also a lot of other steps along the chain, their in-vehicle comms network, the uplink they're working with

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

None of that is the problem, shit happen, the problem is them asking them to come get their stuff instead of apologizing and sending the luggage at their own expense with a free ride at a future time.

sending the luggage at their own expense

Are they willing to take the risk of it getting lost or damaged?

What do you think USPS and other shipping carriers do?

They seem to have changed this recently, possibly due to theft or items falling from the trunk.

My last two trunk-use rides have had closed trunks on arrival.

tbh, I do that with Uber/Lyft, too

For what it’s worth, I always leave the door I exited out of open while removing luggage from the trunk. It’s just safer. Edit: from any uber or lyft

I’m very surprised that Waymo support could not turn the vehicle around

Suppose they sent it back to you, and the trunk still doesn't open. Now what?

Thank you, Sunnyvale man, for hitting this edge case before I do.

They offered him two free hour-long rides to their facility and back just to pick up the suitcase? Waymo trouble than it’s worth

Why couldn’t they just stick the suitcase in a Waymo and send it to him?

Sounds like there's no guarantee it would let him retrieve it

That's like a free bus ride to Cleveland... if I wanted to go, I'd happily get myself there.

Fearful that a simple software issue could do exactly this, I have adopted an approach to using Waymo with luggage:

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.

That’s funny, I’ve actually used the same algorithm but with taxis in general, for having the same exact issue as the person in this article… but with a real driver. (All of this assuming it’s safe to keep a door open!)

Well, it's safe for me!

This is a general fear for me whenever I take a taxi or something like it: i always remind the driver of my luggage in the back when we arrive and ask them whether they can help me get it.

This past week I took a Waymo and had difficulty exiting. It seemed like someone may have enabled the child locks. I'm overall very positive on the service, but this kind of issue needs to be addressed by the company.

(The sfist.com site seems to be extremely slow atm)

https://web.archive.org/web/20260502234729/https://sfist.com...

You can prevent this by leaving the passenger door open until you've gotten the trunk open.

+1.

Brought up in a low-trust env and this became habitual.

take two complementary rides to pick it up

That seems... reasonable? They're not saying "come at your own expense" but giving him a ride there and back.

It'd be nicer if they sent someone with his luggage TO HIM rather than making HIM take his time to go on a tour to the depot, though.

Imagine if the company had self-driving cars, they wouldn't even need "someone", they could just send one of those self-driving cars!

...and then what happens if it also malfunctions in the same way when it gets there, or his stuff gets stolen on the way?

No, it doesn't. It used to be when the airline lost your bag they would get it to you no matter what. They own their mistake, and make it right to the best of their ability. In the most egregious case I can recall, delivering skis and poles 4hr+ from the airport into a remote mountain village ca. 2003. This is how you build trust in your brand--when you fuck up, you take ownership and make it right. You don't just shrug it off and throw a gift card on the floor like "take it or leave it idgaf".

OTOH, a free trip to the depot and back is actually more than you'd get from a traditional taxi service under the same circumstances.

If this happened in a traditional taxi or even Uber, you'd call the driver or the company's dispatch line, and they'd send the cabbie back with your stuff. But it would also be mostly your own fault and you'd tip the driver for doing this.

If I steal your luggage, do you expect to be paid to get it or that I return to you?

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.

Agreed - they dont even need to send an employee to do it, they can just send a driverless waymo with the luggage surely!

Airlines will send you their luggage if misplaced

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.

> airlines often have their own cargo/courier service which they can easily use for delivery

That is indeed convenient. But not quite as convenient as having your own self-driving cars you can use for delivery.

Love that. Larry where's my stuff?

Why can’t they just put back into a car in the back seat or whatever and send it off to him? Seems strange to make it so difficult when they surely have a vehicle sitting right there in their depot that could do the job as soon as the customer is back home.

What if they did that, and the car somehow arrives empty? They're going to be in even bigger trouble.

How do we help you (and anyone else who thinks this is reasonable) to understand that it's absolutely not. Sure, it could be worse, but it also could be much better.

"much better", how? They've already fucked up, and you trust them to do anything else that could make the situation even worse?

I'm genuinely curious how you think it's acceptable for a company to make a mistake and the burden the customer with resolving it.

I value my time more than you appear to value your own.

It's amazing for us to consider "massively wasting someone's time" as "complementary".

Not that I'd trust a self-driving car anyway, but if I were in his situation I would absolutely take the free ride there and back to get my stuff. It would be even more "massively wasting someone's time" to wait for them to do something else otherwise, which would entail a lot more risk.

100% agree, but, if that's the fix for the bug, I'd probably take an Uber next time. (I say this as someone with hundreds of Waymo rides)

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.

Not keeping the door open while grabbing luggage is NPC behavior no matter if it's waymo, Uber or a taxi.

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

wow these shitty comments/people blaming the victim for not taking more precaution are everywhere

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