A white Waymo self-driving car parked on a street as a pedestrian walks past.

No driver? No problem. Waymos are safer than us

By Stephen Richer and Josh Heywood

Originally published in the Arizona Republic · March 26, 2026

A recent viral TikTok showed a self-driving Waymo make a left turn across multiple lanes of rapidly-incoming traffic while its passengers screamed and cursed. It was a driving maneuver you’d hope your 16-year-old would not make.

The video has over 106,000 likes and hundreds of comments along the lines of: “Oh absolutely not” and “Ain’t no way I’m trusting self-driving cars. Computers malfunction all the time. That’s crazy.”

And indeed, we have heard (or seen) of “computers malfunctioning” in the context of driverless cars. There are self-driving cars that have driven around in circles (“I’m getting dizzy”). Or self-driving cars that have gone the wrong way (“we were quite frightened”). The Arizona Republic has compiled a number of these Waymo-gone-wrong incidents.

Read the full piece at the Arizona Republic →

Go deeper: see our fact page on data centers in Arizona and why Arizona’s growth matters.

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