Picture this: you’re sitting in the back of a Waymo, heading home after a night out, when suddenly someone starts pounding on the windows and screaming at you. You’re trapped. There’s no driver to take control, no emergency override, and when you call support, they just tell you to stay put. This nightmare scenario isn’t hypothetical, it’s happening right now to Bay Area residents as Waymo prepares to expand to 20 cities this year.

SF resident Doug Fulop experienced exactly this in January when an aggressor attacked the Waymo he was sharing with two other passengers. For six agonizing minutes, the man punched at the windows while screaming at them for “giving money to a robot”. Fulop called Waymo Support, but the response was basically: sit tight and hope for the best. There was no way for anyone to take manual control of the vehicle, and the company wasn’t remotely piloting it to safety either.

The scariest part? Fulop and his fellow passengers watched helplessly as a crowd gathered around them, some apparently cheering on the attacker. Eventually, when the guy got distracted and stepped away, the car’s sensors picked up the gap and the vehicle finally drove off. Police arrived afterward to confirm what had gone down.

Unsurprisingly, Fulop stopped using Waymo at night after that. “As passengers, we deserve more safety than that if someone is trying to attack us”, he told the New York Times. “This can’t be the policy to be trapped there”.

This raises some genuinely tough questions. Should Waymo’s software recognize dangerous situations and attempt to escape, even if that means potentially hitting the attacker or nearby pedestrians? The company has made its vehicles slightly more aggressive over the years, but they remain extremely cautious, especially around crosswalks. It’s a trade-off nobody signed up for.

Interestingly, another rider, tech writer Anders Sorman-Nilsson, had a different take on his LA incident where five people on e-bikes surrounded his Waymo and tried to force the doors open. He actually felt safer than he would have with a human driver, partly because the exterior cameras were recording everything, and partly because a panicked human driver might have given up his wallet to make the situation go away.

As Waymo continues expanding across the country, these incidents will likely multiply. And if mass job displacement from AI becomes reality, you can bet anti-robot sentiment will get even more intense. These cars are already targets during protests and demonstrations. The company’s got some serious work to do on passenger safety protocols before things escalate further.