{"id":370708,"date":"2026-06-22T22:19:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T22:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/370708\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T22:19:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T22:19:10","slug":"san-francisco-passenger-recounts-being-stuck-inside-self-driving-waymo-car-through-sf-construction-zone-followed-by-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/370708\/","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco passenger recounts being stuck inside self-driving Waymo car through SF construction zone, followed by police"},"content":{"rendered":"

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco resident Elliot Slade had a terrifying experience on a Waymo ride back to the city last month.<\/p>\n

Slade says he was about five minutes into a journey along Highway 101 when his Waymo came into a construction zone.<\/p>\n

He says while the car first tried merging into other lanes, it eventually drove into the construction zone itself before taking off.<\/p>\n

“There were signs. There were lights. There were cones. And it went through the cones and then sped up straight away,” Slade said.<\/p>\n

To make matters even worse, Slade said a nearby highway patrol car began chasing them after seeing what was going on.<\/p>\n

“Shouting, ‘Stop Waymo. Stop Waymo. Stop Waymo.’ We’re like- what the heck is going on?” Slade said.<\/p>\n

Slade says the Waymo eventually left the construction zone and then took an exit off of the freeway into a residential neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Instances like these are what’s led Waymo to\u00a0recall the software for almost 4,000 cars<\/a>, according to notices filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.<\/p>\n

Records show there were seven cases on Bay Area roads just in one day last month.<\/p>\n

In a statement sent to San Francisco ABC affiliate KGO, Waymo says they’ve identified improvement areas for their cars in construction zones.<\/p>\n

They’ve also voluntarily restricted freeway access while they implement those improvements.<\/p>\n

It’s a move supported by Slade, who says he and his fianc\u00e9 even feared for their lives.<\/p>\n

“In that moment it’s like, ‘oh this technology is not ready. This is 100% not ready.’ If something else had gone wrong, someone in that road might have got hit. We might have crashed in the car,” Slade said.<\/p>\n

Autonomous vehicle experts say while issues will happen with new technologies, there are steps companies like Waymo can take.<\/p>\n

That includes things like better sharing of data between cars and state organizations.<\/p>\n

“Transportation agencies that are doing construction on highways, they’re actively feeding data into these data exchanges that connect to vehicles,” said Scott Moura of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies.<\/p>\n

Slade took an Uber home that night and says he’s only taken Waymo once since the incident.<\/p>\n

“I don’t want to use it again. There was a moment where even getting into it again was kind of freaky. A bit of PTSD- yeah,” Slade said.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 KGO-TV. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco resident Elliot Slade had a terrifying experience on a Waymo ride back to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367880,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[150137,101,103,102,36141,104,106,105,32380,150136],"class_list":["post-370708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-150137","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-self-driving","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-waymo-car","tag-waymo-san-francisco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}