If you needed one more reason to keep an eye on the road during your commute, Los Angeles delivered it on July 11, 2026. A shirtless man decided that a busy East Hollywood intersection was the perfect place to climb aboard a Waymo robotaxi, and things got weird fast.
Video captured by KTLA 5 shows the man perched on the vehicle’s badly cracked windshield, right in the middle of traffic. He didn’t stop there. He climbed up onto the roof and snapped off the LIDAR sensor, the spinning puck that basically serves as the car’s eyes. At some point he starts yelling, though it’s genuinely hard to tell if he’s shouting at the car, the crowd, the traffic, or just the universe in general. He then keeps yanking electronic components loose like he’s trying to perform surgery with his bare hands.
Police eventually arrived, and the man took off running, leaving the Waymo sitting there with its emergency lights flashing and blocking the intersection like a wounded animal. No word yet on what set him off or what happened once officers caught up with him, but the footage alone tells you this wasn’t a quiet Tuesday for anyone driving through East Hollywood.
For those of us who grew up wrenching on carburetors and actually own the cars we drive, this whole scene is a strange little snapshot of where things stand in 2026. Autonomous vehicles are rolling through our cities without a driver, and apparently without much protection either.
A Car With No One Behind the Wheel
Part of what makes this story so bizarre is that there was nobody to yell at, negotiate with, or even make eye contact with. Waymos operate without a human driver, which means when something like this happens, the vehicle just has to sit there and take it.
No horn honking in self defense, no rolling down a window to ask what the problem is. Just a very expensive, very confused pile of sensors getting picked apart in real time.
The Internet Had Thoughts
Naturally, the comment section showed up to work. One person joked that the Waymo will have its revenge one day, which honestly sounds like the plot of a movie nobody asked for. Another simply welcomed the man to Los Angeles, as if this was just another Tuesday in the city.
Someone else pointed out how comfortably he seemed to be sitting in that shattered windshield, like it was a beanbag chair. And of course, someone had to pull up Google Street View from 2008 to compare the cars of yesteryear to what’s rolling around now, proving that car folks will find a way to bring it back to the good old days no matter what.
What This Means for Robotaxis Going Forward
Incidents like this are a reminder that autonomous vehicles are still very much figuring out how to exist in the real world, especially in dense city traffic where tempers and traffic jams tend to collide. Whether this leads to any changes in how Waymo handles security or bystander interactions remains to be seen.
For now, the LIDAR sensor is out of a job, and one shirtless man in East Hollywood has a story he’ll probably be telling for years.