Bad news if you’ve spent years planning the perfect bank robbery: the future has arrived, and apparently it involves escaping the scene of the crime in a self-driving taxi.
According to police in San Francisco, an unidentified man allegedly strolled into a local yoga studio, helped himself to an armful of activewear, and then made his getaway in a driverless Waymo taxi.
Not a roaring V8 muscle car. Not a stolen superbike. A silent electric Jaguar programmed to stop at pedestrian crossings.
It’s perhaps the least exciting chase scene ever conceived.
Naturally, you’d think solving the case would be easy. The getaway vehicle is effectively a giant computer covered in cameras. Twenty-nine of them, in fact. It’s less a taxi and more a rolling episode of Big Brother.
Yet nearly six months later, police are still looking for the culprit. Why? Because modern technology is brilliant right up until someone decides to be annoying.
Investigators believe the suspect may have used a burner account or stolen phone to summon the car. Then, by the time police got around to obtaining a warrant, the interior footage had already been deleted.
Meanwhile, privacy laws mean anyone captured by the external cameras appears blurred. So despite being surrounded by enough sensors to guide a spacecraft onto Mars, the car may have inadvertently helped engineer the world’s most boring unsolved heist.
This isn’t even the first time criminals have discovered autonomous taxis. Last year, a suspected thief in Los Angeles allegedly tried the same trick.
Unfortunately for him, police simply switched on their emergency lights and the Waymo immediately pulled over, because unlike most getaway drivers, it wasn’t interested in risking points on its licence.
The whole affair highlights a fascinating reality of the autonomous future. We’ve spent years worrying that self-driving cars might one day rise up and take over the world. Instead, they’ve become unwilling accomplices in yoga-pants theft.
Progress, then. Just perhaps not in the direction anyone expected.
