LA's Viral Waymo Attack: 'Autonomous' Saw It Coming

The scariest video on the internet this weekend wasn't a trailer. It was a shirtless man in the middle of Sunset Boulevard, lounging in the crushed windshield of a Waymo like a beach chair, then climbing onto the roof of the driverless car and tearing its guts out while traffic sat frozen in every direction. Nobody honked. Nobody got out. Everyone just filmed.

What Actually Happened on Sunset Boulevard

On Saturday afternoon, July 11, Los Angeles police responded to the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Edgemont Street in East Hollywood, where a man had turned a Waymo robotaxi into a one-man demolition site. Video posted to the Citizen app — and quickly picked up by KTLA and ABC7 — shows him reclining in the smashed windshield, standing on the roof, yanking out the car's inner workings, and at one point holding a bent windshield wiper while screaming directly at the sensor dome on top of the vehicle. Screaming at the car's eye. Let that image sit for a second.

LAPD officers arrived around 1:35 p.m. and arrested him for vandalism. Waymo hasn't commented publicly.

Here's the detail that turns a weird-LA news story into something colder: as of this writing, it's still unclear whether anyone was inside the Waymo when the destruction started.

The Question Everyone in the Comments Is Asking

Scroll any repost of the video and you'll find the same comment, over and over: what if you were in it?

It's the right question. A Waymo has no driver to hit the gas, no one behind the wheel to lean on the horn and scare a guy off the hood. When something goes wrong outside a robotaxi, the thing responsible for protecting you is the same calm, rule-following software that just decided the safest move is to stop and stay stopped. You're belted into the back seat of a machine that is being torn apart, and the machine's response is patience.

This isn't the first time the question has come up, either. In recent months, driverless cars have been ridden, ridden on, and swarmed — teens hanging off a Waymo in Santa Monica traffic, joyriders treating robotaxis like amusement rides. The cars always take it. That's what they're built to do. And that's exactly what makes it unnerving.

We Already Made This Nightmare

Here's the part that has our whole team staring at the footage: Autonomous, one of the flagship series in Screamify's new Micro Horrors™ line, is built on precisely this fear.

In Autonomous, a passenger gets into a driverless car for a routine ride — and the ride stops being routine. Locked doors. A route that isn't the route. A machine that knows the way, while something else entirely decides where it's going. The series stars Domenic Jungling and Erin Áine, and it was shot inside a real self-driving car — not a set, not a mockup — which is why the claustrophobia feels the way it does. There's nowhere for the camera to go, because there's nowhere for you to go. Jungling has talked about building dread in a locked back seat, and after this weekend, nobody needs the concept explained to them anymore.

Micro Horrors™ are Screamify's new short-form original format: bite-sized episodes engineered to hit like a full horror feature in the time it takes your rideshare to arrive. Autonomous premiered this month, and its timing is starting to feel less like a release date and more like a warning.

When the Horror Premise Shows Up on the News

Horror has always worked this way. Psycho made the shower unsafe. Jaws emptied beaches. The best horror doesn't invent new fears — it gets to the real ones first, and waits for reality to catch up.

Reality just caught up fast. Autonomous imagined being trapped inside the driverless car when the outside world turns hostile. Forty-eight hours after our premiere weekend, a man in East Hollywood stood on top of a Waymo and showed a few million people exactly what that looks like from the outside. The inside view? That one's ours.

Watch Autonomous — and decide for yourself whether you'd stay calm in the back seat.

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