I’m not sure how much or what type of social media you consume, but you may have noticed in between videos of people freaking out on airplanes and advertisements for testosterone supplements that there have been a number of viral posts showing a video of a Waymo Jaguar i-Pace driving across the manicured grass of a golf course. Most of these videos have delighted in the assumption that this is happening because the wayward Waymo robotaxi got confused and is now barreling out of control across a golf course, wreaking havoc.
Now, I won’t pretend to be more evolved than anyone else – part of me would have been delighted had this been the case, and I’m sure I would have had as much fun writing some snarky whatever about this renegade Waymo hunting down golfers for their delicious golfer blood, but that doesn’t really seem to be what was going on.
Before we get into the truth, let’s take a look at how this is being cast online. Here’s a sample post from Instagram – wait, crap, no, this is that YouTube Shorts thing:
As you can infer by the goofy laugh in the background and the “TECHNOLOGY IS BEAUTIFUL” caption, the message here is definitely that this Waymo has gone haywire, and chaos is ensuing.
This one is on Instagram:
It’s essentially the same post and the narrative is pretty much the same for all of these: this Waymo drove itself onto the golf course. Some may choose to add a little extra element of snarkiness because they’re backing another pony in the robotaxi race, like this dude:
A Waymo drove onto a golf course today and nearly hit several golfers
FSD would never do such a thing pic.twitter.com/IBsSXg35MA
— Jeff ????
(@JeffTutorials) September 28, 2025
This X-Twitter user is a well-established Tesla stan, being the very same person who embarrassingly tried to make the argument that somehow turn signal stalks were harder to use than Tesla’s deeply stupid steering wheel indicator buttons. That’s likely why this poster not only happily buys into the narrative that the Waymo drove onto the golf course because of some technological failure, but also states that “FSD would never do such a thing,” referring to tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD), which I suppose really never could do such a thing because FSD is not currently legally able to drive without a human in the car at all. So there.
Also, “nearly hit several golfers?” What the hell video was this guy watching? There’s no one even close to the car!
The point is that everyone is assuming from this – what, six-second? – clip is that the Waymo has gone deeply and wildly off the rails. Upon seeing this, after my initial delight and hope for newsworthy drama, something about it just didn’t seem right. This would be a pretty significant failure for a Waymo; there are no roads at all here, and if the Waymo’s driving system didn’t notice the total absence of a road, things have gone very, very wrong. And why are there no follow-up stories about what happened wherever the car ended up?
You’d think it’d have driven into a sand trap or a pond or a shack of caddies or something, right? But there’s nothing.
To get to the bottom of this, I reached out to Waymo and just asked. And while they declined to give me an actual quote, I learned that there was, in fact, a human driving the car, and the car was driving on a pre-planned route to an event at Penmar Golf Course. Waymo said as much in a post of their own:
Hey there, this was a human-driven car, getting ready for an event at the Penmar Golf Course.
— Waymo (@Waymo) September 29, 2025
So, really, all of this was very much a non-event, but the reaction to this non-event is interesting, I think, in the context of where public attitudes toward self-driving cars and robotaxis are at this moment in history, which seems to be in a place of skepticism, or at least an eagerness to see failure. The allure and glamour of self-driving cars seems to be fading in the mainstream public’s opinion, which in hindsight makes sense as the overly optimistic and aggrandized predictions bump up against the filthy and immobile rock of reality.
Also interesting is the reaction of the pro-Tesla camps to this video, like what we saw in that other tweet above. There are also articles like this one from Teslarati, with the headline “Waymo responds to shocking video that would have gotten Tesla FSD crucified” which is a strange take, especially the use of “shocking” in the headline, considering that the article notes Waymo’s honestly boring explanation and yet still somehow manages to both be alarmist and to cast Tesla as an imagined victim in a non-event that didn’t even have anything to do with Tesla in the first place.
In short, what the hell is the matter with everybody?
It’s a good idea to point out, publicly, significant failures of robotaxis and other automated vehicles. There’s no reason to cover any of that stuff up. At the same time, it does no one any good to just make stuff up, as we saw here, where, it appears, precisely zero investigation happened before people started posting tiny video clips and making all manner of assumptions.
So, like all good news stories, nothing really happened here. At all. A dude drove a car across some grass. And somehow that went viral, because we’re all very eager for robotaxis to do dumb things, because that gets clicks.
I suppose I’m a part of this whole system, myself. I guess the moral here is what you likely already know: don’t believe everything you see on social media!
The post That Video Of A Waymo Robotaxi On A Golf Course Isn’t Really What You Think It Is appeared first on The Autopian.
