San Francisco man recalls being inside Waymo as it sped through construction zone, chased by police
It was a ride a San Francisco couple will never forget and will never want to take again. Elliot Slade and his fiancée took a Waymo from San Mateo, hoping to reach their Mission District home.
Instead, the Waymo sped through a construction zone, was chased by police, then veered off the highway into a residential neighborhood.
"The Waymo started freaking out as we got closer to the merge cause the lanes were kind of all merging," Slade said. "One lane was gone, another lane was, who knows where it was. Cars were all over the place going in."
Slade captured cellphone video showing the Waymo trying to merge, but it was what happened next that terrified him and his fiancée.
"The scariest part, we're all like OK, something's happening," he said. "We're just going to pull over, we're going to be safe. Then it accelerated to highway speeds down this construction lane."
At that point, Slade wondered if he was going to make it out of the Waymo alive.
"There were construction signs," he added. "There were lights going on. Police in the distance and it sped up. That's when I looked at my fiancée, we're done. This is it. We're dead. We're going to die right here in the Waymo."
Slade says the Waymo sped up for roughly 20 seconds. It eventually got off the highway and pulled over in a residential neighborhood. That's when they finally heard from a Waymo representative.
"She came on the line and said from what I could see, it seemed like a stressful experience," he recalls the voice saying. "What do you want to do next? I was like we want to get out. They're like do you want to continue the journey; I was like absolutely not."
Waymo started service on the freeways in November of 2025 in four cities: San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Miami.
"Safety is Waymo's top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with," Waymo said in a statement. "We have temporarily paused freeway operations, as we work to integrate recent technical learnings into our software and expect to resume these routes soon."
Waymo offered Slade three free rides up to $40 each in the future, but he's not sure if he'll take them up on it, definitely not a ride that would require getting on the highway.
"What was scary was that for the first time, we felt completely helpless," he said. "You can't jump into the seat. No one was picking up. It was going at 70 [mph] on this construction lane into what we thought were like trucks. And police and everything. I was like what can we do. We can't even open the door. What do we do at this point?"
Slade is hoping Waymo will thoroughly look into the incident and see how the company can prevent similar incidents from happening again. He says after his ride, he will have a hard time trusting autonomous vehicles until an independent study is done and transparent data is released.
"It was one of those things, once you lost your autonomy in the car, I don't want to feel that again," he said. "Like it was a really freaky moment."