If you’ve ever been stuck behind a car that just won’t move, you know the special kind of frustration that builds up fast. Now imagine that car has no driver to honk at, no window to wave at, and no explanation for what’s going on inside its own computer brain. That’s exactly what happened recently on Miami’s Venetian Causeway, when not one, not two, but four Waymo robotaxis came to a stop and held up traffic for reasons nobody outside the company seems to know yet.
Videos posted to the local account Only in Dade showed the driverless vehicles parked in the roadway while human drivers tried to figure out how to get around them. It’s the kind of scene that makes you appreciate just how much patience regular commuting requires these days, whether the car in front of you has a person behind the wheel or not.
This isn’t the first time Waymo’s vehicles have caused a headache on that particular stretch of road. Back in January, a driverless car stopped in the same general area, frustrating dozens of drivers who had nowhere to go but wait it out. Two incidents on the same bridge in the same year is starting to look less like bad luck and more like a pattern worth watching.
For now, plenty of South Florida drivers say they’re keeping their distance from the autonomous vehicles when they spot them on the road, and honestly, that’s a fair reaction until the technology proves itself out a little more.
What Actually Happened on the Causeway
According to NBC 6 South Florida, the four Waymo vehicles simply stopped in the middle of the Venetian Causeway with no clear cause.
There was no crash, no obstruction visible in the footage, just robotaxis parked where they shouldn’t have been, leaving human drivers to navigate around them.
Drivers Are Understandably Wary
It’s one thing to trust cruise control on the highway. It’s another to trust a car with nobody in the driver’s seat to make split-second decisions in real traffic.
Several drivers interviewed said they now try to put extra distance between themselves and Waymo vehicles whenever they spot one, which seems like a reasonable habit until these hiccups become less frequent.
Waymo’s Response, or Lack Thereof
Waymo has said in the past that safety remains its top priority and that the company is committed to learning from incidents like these. As for this specific event, Waymo had not responded with an explanation at the time of reporting.
Miami police have a simple message for drivers who run into trouble with a Waymo vehicle on the road: call it in. Local law enforcement wants to be looped in on these situations so they can respond and keep traffic moving safely.
As autonomous vehicles become a more common sight on South Florida roads, incidents like this one are likely to keep sparking conversation among drivers who are still getting used to sharing the road with cars that drive themselves.