Self-driving cars have been given the green light in over 50 countries and 41 US states — but in reality, that doesn't mean they're ready to hit the pavement.Take that from Becky Navarro of Austin, Texas, who says she found herself stuck in the middle of an express loop when her self-driving Waymo taxi decided it needed a break. After stopping, the vehicle seemed to offer no way for Navarro and her passengers to leave, effectively trapping the group on an active highway as cars whipped past.Navarro, who detailed her wild ride on TikTok, said the incident started when the Waymo went haywire, whisking the group off in the opposite direction they needed to go.Luckily, Waymo riders can contact live customer support for incidents that happen during their ride. Unfortunately, the remote agent didn't do much — and by the sound of it, couldn't have even if he wanted to.Once customer service was called, Navarro says the car stopped in the middle of a lane under MoPac — an infamous toll-loop running along the west side of Austin. MoPac is frequently listed among the most dangerous highways in the city, and is so notorious it spawned its own viral parody account on X-formerly-Twitter, Evil Mopac."So then we're talking to customer support," Navarro explains, "we kept saying, 'hey we're on the highway, please, like move the car.' Cars kept honking at us and it would not move, would not let us out."Video from within the Waymo shows the group arguing with a live support agent as a screen prompts riders to "please exit now," all while an autonomous voice continuously chimes "vehicle approaching" at each passing car. "I understand, but we don't have a way to just physically move the cars," the agent stammers as the women ask to leave.Though Waymo's user guide has no advice on how to exit its vehicles in an emergency, some social media users suggest that pulling the door handle twice is the key to exiting in situations like these. Whether Navarro and her friends were truly locked in or just unaware of the exit mechanism is unknown.To the agent's credit, exiting onto a high-speed MoPac ramp isn't exactly the safest option, though it does pose the question of why the Waymo parked itself there in the first place. And from a practical standpoint, why is trapping riders inside the only option when Waymo's self-driving cars go haywire?Earlier this year, a man experienced a similar incident when a Waymo car began driving in endless circles around a parking lot in Phoenix, Arizona."I've got my seatbelt on, I can't get out of the car," the driver said from the backseat of the Waymo. "Has this been hacked?"Given the glitchy state of self-driving tech — and the life or death stakes involved — you wouldn't be nuts for wondering why these things are allowed on roads at all.As far back as 2011, state governments have been slashing red tape to allow companies to "live test" self-driving cars on public roads, a move often used to court high-value tech companies to open operations in states like Nevada and Arizona.Under the Trump administration, the already fractured regulatory landscape is poised to relax even further, meaning profit-seeking companies like Waymo, Uber, and Tesla will be given even more power to fill our streets with error-prone cars like the ones Navarro experienced in Austin.That regulatory handover has consequences. Autonomous vehicles have already clocked 617 crashes in the US, 21 percent of which occurred with something other than a car — meaning cyclists, pedestrians, and objects on the side of the road. Between May and September of 2022 alone, self-driving cars racked up a whopping 11 fatalities.Contrast this to a country with strong automotive regulation like China, which imposed strict controls over self-driving advertising and software after an autonomous vehicle accident killed three college students in 2024.Given the current state of things, it's clearly time to pump the brakes on self-driving cars, even if that means further delaying shareholder profit. After all, you can't put a price on human lives.More on self-driving cars: An Internal Tesla Analysis Found the Robotaxi Would Lose Money, and You'll Never Guess What Elon Musk Did in ResponseShare This Article