The hit 1985 sci-fi film Back to the Future promised us flying cars and hoverboards by 2015. A decade later, we have automatic vehicles that crash into poles and require a monthly subscription to adjust your seat.
Now, it might take two cars to complete a trip: the robotaxi that drops you off, and another dispatched to close the door after you step out. Some robotaxi customers are so lazy, it turns out, that Waymo has teamed up with DoorDash to send drivers to close the doors of automatic vehicles rendered immobile.
A Reddit post in the r/DoorDash_Dasher subreddit shows a screenshot of a DoorDash offer in Downtown Atlanta to go “Close a Waymo door.” The door dasher would be paid an initial $6.25 to accept the offer and an additional $5 upon completion of the task.
The DoorDash partnership is the latest in Waymo’s efforts to work out one wonky non-automated feature of its otherwise automated robotaxi program: the doors require a human to close them. Waymo has already employed a similar practice in Los Angeles, The Washington Post reported, using the app Honk that contracts with towing companies to slam those doors shut. Drivers on the app, dubbed the “uber for towing,” have reported getting paid as much as $24 to close a Waymo door. Towing a car—as was necessary during a recent power outage in San Francisco that rendered many Waymo vehicles immobile—can bring in as much as $80.
Waymo’s robotaxi rollout may not have created jobs for drivers, but it has created a microeconomy for gig workers who can spend up to an hour looking for the cars, according to the Post. At the time, Waymo spokesperson Katherine Barna told the publication the door issues were “not too common” and that the company was focusing on “educating and informing our riders” about closing the door.
The Alphabet subsidiary already operates fully autonomous commercial vehicles in 10 U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Miami and Austin in addition to Atlanta and Los Angeles, and has plans to expand to Dallas, San Antonio and Orlando later this year.
In October last year, DoorDash and Waymo announced a partnership to bring autonomous delivery service for customers within the Metro Phoenix area, where customers will receive their DoorDashed food orders in autonomous Waymo vehicles. “We are excited to make everyday errands easier with the Waymo Driver, offering the added peace of mind that comes with our safe and reliable technology,” said Waymo’s Head of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships Nicole Gavel in the statement announcing the partnership.
The partnership would advance “our vision for a multi-modal autonomous future of local commerce,” added David Richter, Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at DoorDash.
Waymos wronged in the wild
Waymo pointed to the San Francisco power outage as an environmental stress test of the limitations of autonomous vehicles, vowing the company will make changes to how the vehicles operate in various emergency scenarios.
“Navigating an event of this magnitude presented a unique challenge for autonomous technology,” a post from the company read.
When the power outage took out large swatches of traffic lights in the city, law enforcement had to manually direct traffic. Waymo vehicles are equipped with a design feature that would sometimes request a confirmation check to confirm what the vehicle is experiencing on the ground.
“While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets,” read the statement.
Autonomous vehicles often seem to be the target of vandalism in recent events. In 2024, a man would chase Cruise’s AVs with a hatchet in San Francisco. Employees of General Motor’s short-lived robotaxi program told Fortune of countless stories of people slashing tires and even stripping down to the moon the vehicles as they attempted to drive off.
More recently in June of last year, demonstrators burned at least six Waymo vehicles to the ground in Los Angeles during anti-ICE protests.
