There’s a famous catchphrase, “Florida Man,” due to the fact that so many news stories have headlines that start with “Florida Man” and end with the Floridian doing something incredibly dumb or bizarre. But you could just as well begin many headlines with “Today in LA” followed by, “this insane thing happened.”
And that’s exactly the case in this viral video where a Los Angeles woman ordered a Waymo self-driving taxi… only to find a man in the trunk. What was he doing there? How did he get there? Even the man himself didn’t quite seem to know. When asked how he happened to be in her taxi, he was nonsensical:
" ... I'm trying to figure this out," the man responds. "This [expletive] won't let me out."
Watch (warning, profanity):
A mother in Los Angeles ordered a driverless Waymo robotaxi for her daughter near MacArthur Park.
— Dane (@UltraDane) December 14, 2025
When the vehicle arrived, they opened the rear trunk/hatch area and discovered a random would-be murderer/rapist lying inside, curled up behind the back seats.
Waymo called the… pic.twitter.com/3gqvgOvujh
Waymo called the incident "unacceptable," confirmed their rider support team assisted, and said they're implementing changes to prevent repeats.
It’s not the only wild thing to happen in a Waymo in recent days, as RedState's Ward Clark reported Wednesday:
Woman Delivers While Riding in Self-Driving Robotaxi in San Francisco
Where did this latest event happen? Not surprisingly, in the notorious drug and gang-infested MacArthur Park area of the City of Angels.
"I just want to know why he was in the trunk. Who put him in the trunk? How did he get into the trunk?" said Ollie Shirvani, a Los Angeles resident.
The encounter comes just a week after a separate Waymo vehicle in Los Angeles drove through an active police standoff. Officers were pointing guns at a suspect on the ground when the driverless car continued moving through the scene with a passenger still inside.
Nationwide, more than 3,000 Waymo vehicles are under recall after the company reported a software issue that caused some cars to pass stopped school buses with their stop arms extended.
Since this is Los Angeles, the interloper faced no consequences, because LA police said “no crime had been committed.” They have not revealed how he got into the trunk or why he was there.
In a way, the incident is funny, simply because of how ludicrous it is, but it points to a more sinister issue: safety, and especially women’s safety.
I’ve been seeing more and more Waymos around the streets of the city, and frankly, it’s disconcerting. I don’t want to be that “get off my lawn guy" who’s afraid of new technology, because it’s coming whether I like it or not. After all, variations of the phrase, “We’ve developed more technology in the last 50 years than in all of previous human history combined,” are thrown about frequently, and we can argue about whether they're 100 percent accurate, but I think we can agree that the pace, just in our lifetimes, is dizzying.
Seeing those cars with no drivers at the stoplight continues to throw me. If I ever do call for one, I am definitely checking the trunk.
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