Source: SFist - San Francisco News, Restaurants, Events, & Sports
This isn't just a consumer service failure. It exposes hidden dependencies autonomous vehicle operators are building into travel infrastructure without adequate fail-safes. When a driverless car leaves a passenger at the airport without their luggage because of a mechanical glitch, accountability shifts in ways humans instinctively resist: there's no driver to notice, apologize, or problem-solve in real time. As Waymo scales from tech demos to everyday transit, these edge cases will compound into a reputational cost unless the company engineers redundancy around physical interactions, not just driving logic.