Here's what happened: a Waymo rider at Mineta San Jose International got out of his autonomous vehicle, went to grab his luggage from the trunk, and the car simply... left. Drove away. With his bags. No driver to flag down, no window to knock on, just taillights and the faint hum of an electric motor disappearing into the terminal loop.

The kicker? As one Bay Area resident put it, "It's nice that Waymo offered to make him pay for shipping his stuff to him after the trunk would not open and ran off with his stuff." Customer service at its finest.

Look, we're not anti-Waymo here. The technology is genuinely impressive, and the cars are statistically safer than the average Bay Area driver who treats a yellow light like a starting pistol. But this incident highlights a growing pattern of edge-case failures that Waymo seems content to handle reactively rather than proactively.

One local suggested a workaround: keep the car door open until you've retrieved your luggage, since the vehicle won't drive off with a door ajar. That's clever — and also exactly the kind of hack that passengers shouldn't need to figure out on their own.

The broader concern is accountability. When a human Uber driver screws up, there's a person to call, argue with, or report. When a Waymo malfunctions, you're filing a ticket into the void and hoping the algorithm's customer support pipeline spits out something better than a shipping invoice.

As one SF resident noted, the individual driving may be safer, "but these broader issues are substantial." Blocked firehouses, frozen intersections, luggage heists — these aren't trivial glitches. They're the predictable consequences of deploying thousands of autonomous vehicles in dense urban environments without robust regulatory oversight.

Waymo should be solving these problems before they happen, not after they go viral. And California regulators should be demanding it. The technology is ready to drive — but the customer experience and emergency protocols clearly aren't keeping pace.