Tech Bros Try to Help Waymo Entangled With Muni Bus, Leave Behind Stalled Waymo

A new viral video shows a stalled Waymo getting entangled with a Muni bus over the weekend, and when a gaggle of tech bros coming from an industry party try to help, they seem to just make things worse.

It’s hardly even news anymore when an SF self-driving Waymo just stops out of the blue and blocks traffic, though it is still news when that Waymo blocks Kamala Harris’s motorcade.

The latest tale of a stalled and confused Waymo is fodder for a semi-viral video from a startup founder. Evidence suggests the video below is from Saturday night on Divisadero Street, where a stalled Waymo is somehow tangled with a Muni bus. A bunch of tech guys fresh from an industry party try to revive the Waymo; and would you believe they fail to revive the Waymo, but still give themselves credit for fixing everything.

The video is seen above, posted by Freddy Vega, co-founder of the Colombian edtech startup Platzi. “A Waymo car driven by AI crashed with a Muni bus driven by a human in San Francisco,” he said in a Sunday afternoon tweet. “Right in front of YC’s founder after party. So here’s a bunch of CEOs trying to help a helpless robot find his way again.”

“YC” refers to the venture capital firm Y Combinator, though there is no evidence that this “YC’s founder after party” was a sanctioned Y Combinator event. It may have been just some party thrown by any random founder guy whose startup received support from Y Combinator.

And Vega’s narration (in Spanish, but accurately subtitled) gets some pretty funny tech industry jokes in. “This Waymo crashed [into] that Muni bus outside Y Combinator’s retreat,” he says. “So this is a bunch of founders trying to figure out what to do with the Waymo. The irony is that we’re all coming from an AI event discussing the future of automation, and here’s this AI totally stuck, blocking a lot of traffic in the middle of San Francisco.”

At the height of the lunacy, we see these likely drunken dudes even pushing the stalled Waymo up and down, like they’re trying to give it CPR. Gentlemen, there is no way that is going to help revive the car! That is not how things work!

The witty Vega asks aloud, “Which one is a product manager, which one is a CEO, which one a CTO? Who had an exit?” Pointing to one bro who’s meddling but not taking any action, Vega says, “He clearly sold. He’s not doing shit.”

The bus is eventually able to drive away after being disentangled, though we see no sign that the tech bros were of any help in making that happen. Though the video is edited and we don't see the whole incident. Either way, the self-important founder types (all men, of course) give themselves a round of applause once the bus drives away. It’s sort of a microcosm that the tech guys insist they are helping, when they may have just been fucking shit up even worse.

“It was a big struggle, the founders pulled together,” one tech geek victoriously declares. “Founder mode is what really brought us to success. The managers couldn't handle it, but the founders, you know!”

Vega echoes this illusion of success, saying, “They freed the Waymo with all of these YC founders looking. The Muni bus is gone and the Waymo kinda died.” Indeed, the Waymo just sat there — blocking traffic — as the Muni went on to provide actual tangible transit service. Guys, this may not be the win for founders and self-driving car technology that you think it is.

The description that the Waymo "crashed with a Muni bus” is probably not accurate. The bus drove away once unstuck. Had there been a real crash, the Muni driver likely would have stayed at the scene and reported the crash.

A Waymo spokesperson tells SFist that "When the bus pulled alongside one of our stationary vehicles Saturday night, the bus’s rear door made contact with the side of our vehicle and was unable to close. We dispatched our roadside assistance team to retrieve the vehicle, and before they arrived, bystanders rocked our vehicle free of the door, so the bus could proceed."

The incident is likely a scene that was captured in a Sunday SF Standard article called “Second summer in the city: Scenes from a sweltering night in SF,” basically a photoset of people trying  to beat the heat on Saturday night. About a third of the way down that post (linked in the tweet above), we see a Muni bus entangled with a Waymo, with the caption, “People try to help a Muni bus close its doors, which got stuck on a Waymo robotaxi wending its way through the crowds on Divisadero Street.”

This one’s a curious matter for Waymo. We’ve seen obvious cases where vandals go after Waymos, and Waymo does prosecute those vandals. Yet here we have people who were trying to help, but whose interference complicated things, and possibly made matters worse.  

Will Waymo go on its vaunted crusade against people who interfere with their vehicles when the instigators were a bunch of tech dudes coming out of a Y Combinator afterparty? And will those tech dudes temper their entitled fantasies about “the future of automation” after seeing that automation screwing things up? The answer to the latter question is certainly no, and we’ll see if anything plays out with the first question.

Note: This post has been updated with comment from Waymo.

Related: Waymos Infuriate SoMa Neighborhood With Cacophony of 4AM Horn-Honking [SFist]