[CaliforniaKarl]

I am surprised the trunk didn't open, and I’m very surprised that Waymo support could not turn the vehicle around. I’ve had a Waymo alert me when I left something in the back seat; I’m surprised it did not do the same for the trunk.

I think the person should report this to either the California DMV or CPUC, as well as the local airport authority.

For autonomous vehicles, I think people need to ‘normalize’ leaving one of the doors open until all people & cargo are out of the vehicle. The vehicle may complain, but it’s not going to drive off.

[disillusioned]

Any time I've loaded something into the trunk of a Waymo, it pre-emptively pops the trunk when I'm getting out _for_ me and reminds me to get my things from the trunk, so this is... surprising as a failure mode. Wondering if there was some issue with the latch/opening system, because it's definitely programmed to work the right way. (Or he tossed his stuff into the trunk from the main cabin, but... it's a pretty low hatch ceiling there.)

[zouhair]

None of that is the problem, shit happen, the problem is them asking them to come get their stuff instead of apologizing and sending the luggage at their own expense with a free ride at a future time.

[userbinator]

sending the luggage at their own expense

Are they willing to take the risk of it getting lost or damaged?

[zouhair]

What do you think USPS and other shipping carriers do?

[BoorishBears]

Over hundreds rides I've found it's extremely flakey on if the trunk will open again at dropoff after opening it earlier.

My guess would be the Jaguar's CAN bus being the weak link

[05]

> My guess would be the Jaguar's CAN bus being the weak link

Puzzling because trunk open sensor is already a thing and making sure it’s triggered after a ‘open trunk’ command is issued is not exactly rocket science:)

[BoorishBears]

Besides the CAN bus there's also a lot of other steps along the chain, their in-vehicle comms network, the uplink they're working with

Waymo's own systems are sending the current volume and HVAC settings to the OEM CAN bus every tick (presumably because the HMI's traffic is very low priority and may not be delivered on their network), maybe the trunk release doesn't tolerate repeat activations because of some quirk?

At that point obviously I'm guessing a bit, but the fact this issue has been prominent for so long makes me think there's some platform-specific quirk that's making it more complicated than it looks from the outside

[chaboud]

They seem to have changed this recently, possibly due to theft or items falling from the trunk.

My last two trunk-use rides have had closed trunks on arrival.

[sparky_z]

Not that surprising if the thing that failed was the thing that notices whether or not you put something in the trunk in the first place. Unless it does that routine at the end of every ride, regardless of whether it thinks something is in the trunk or not, then it's not a fail safe system and occasional mishaps like this should be expected at scale.

[gboss]

For what it’s worth, I always leave the door I exited out of open while removing luggage from the trunk. It’s just safer. Edit: from any uber or lyft

[userbinator]

I’m very surprised that Waymo support could not turn the vehicle around

Suppose they sent it back to you, and the trunk still doesn't open. Now what?

[cheriot]

tbh, I do that with Uber/Lyft, too

[ranger_danger]

What happens if one were to keep leaving doors open? I wonder if they would ban you or something.

[cosmotic]

Wonder no more. They order doordashers to close the door.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/waymo-is-paying-doordash-gig...

[ranger_danger]

Interesting... I wonder if getting paid for closing the door still requires you to be active enough on the platform... otherwise I imagine you'd have people signing up for DoorDash just to stand in front of popular places and "hold the door open" for people... $10-20 a pop sounds like a good hustle.

[lokar]

As a passenger, they probably silently black-list you if you do it to much

[Buildstarted]

I think the implication was that people stand around places where waymo goes often and just hold doors open for arriving waymo's to be "helpful". When the passenger leaves they just leave the door open for their doordash friends who are nearby

[userbinator]

They would probably start to consider installing automatic doors if enough people do it.

[jerlam]

Pretty sure the next generation of Waymos, the Zeekr vans, have auto-closing doors.

[kotaKat]

The Ioniq 5s also got modified for automatic doors.