Waymo Trip Leaves Sunnyvale Man Without Luggage

A robotaxi is supposed to remove friction from a trip. In this case, it added a completely new kind of one. A Sunnyvale rider, Di Jin, says his first Waymo trip ended at San Jose Mineta Airport with the car driving away while his suitcase was still locked in the trunk. The ride itself was fine. The handoff at the curb was the failure — and that’s the part that matters most for a service trying to feel boring and reliable. ### What actually went wrong? Jin told NBC Bay Area he took a Waymo from his home in Sunnyvale to the airport on Monday for a business trip to San Diego. When the car arrived, he says the trunk did not open. He tried the physical button and the app, but the bag stayed locked inside. Then the vehicle left with his luggage still in it. ### Why is the trunk such a big deal? Because for an airport ride, the trunk is not some side feature — it is the trip. If the passenger reaches the terminal but the suitcase does not, the ride has basically failed. Jin said the bag held clothes and work materials, so this wasn’t just annoying. It disrupted the trip he was already taking. ### What did Waymo offer him? This is where the story turned from glitch to customer-service problem. Jin says Waymo offered two options: pay to have the luggage shipped back, or use two complimentary rides to go retrieve it from a Waymo depot in San Francisco. From Sunnyvale, he said, that would mean roughly a two-hour round trip just to recover a bag the company already knew was not “lost” in any normal sense. ### Why did that response land so badly? Jin’s argument is pretty intuitive — this was not a passenger forgetting a bag and realizing it later. He says he was standing there, trying to open the trunk, when the system failed and the car departed. So Waymo’s response sounded to him like a lost-and-found script being applied to a situation the company itself created. That’s the gap the story exposes. ### Is this just a one-off? Maybe in the narrow sense, but not in the broader one. SFist pointed to an earlier 2025 report involving Waymo trunk problems and property left behind. That doesn’t prove a widespread technical flaw by itself, but it does suggest this is a known edge case — one serious enough that people had already been warned to think twice before putting important items in the trunk. ### Why does this matter now? Because Waymo is no longer a novelty demo in San Francisco. It has been pushing into more practical, high-stakes trips, including airport runs in San Jose. Airport service raises the bar. Riders are on deadlines, carrying luggage, and have less room for a weird exception. A failure that might feel survivable on a dinner ride becomes much more costly when it happens curbside before a flight. ### So is this a tech problem or a policy problem? Both, but the policy side is what people notice first. A trunk latch can fail in any car. The harder question is what the company does next. If the recovery process feels slow, expensive, or detached from the actual situation, riders stop caring whether the root cause you can’t afford to lose for a day. ### What’s the bottom line? Waymo’s promise is convenience without a driver. But removing the driver also removes the human who can pop the trunk, apologize, and fix a mistake on the spot. This Sunnyvale case makes that tradeoff very concrete. The car got him to the airport. The service did not finish the job.