Lou Pizzichillo pressed “Start ride” on his first-ever Waymo and, a minute or two later, was sitting in a robotaxi parked diagonally across an Atlanta street while a support agent tried to talk the car into moving. The car kept saying no.
The New York pastor, author and church-software founder filmed the whole thing and posted it to Instagram this week with a one-line caption lifted from the car’s own welcome message: “This experience may feel futuristic.” The clip has passed 3.4 million views on Instagram and another 1.8 million on TikTok. When Badiyaa checked the original reel on the evening of Friday, October 30, it showed roughly 157,000 likes and 3,800 comments.
How a short ride turned into a standoff
The trouble starts before he even gets in. The white car rolls toward him in a parking lot with its turn signal on, then drifts slightly past. “Uh, hello? Excuse me, sir? Uh, it’s for me,” he jokes as it keeps going.
Once inside, the screen between the front seats greets him by name under a “Waymo x Uber” banner, and a calm voice promises riding tips. Shortly after, the car stops in the road, apparently spooked by yellow chains hanging from a striped arch ahead. It tries a three-point turn and gets halfway.
“We are sideways in the road,” Pizzichillo says, as other drivers steer around him. “I do feel vulnerable.”
The screen flashes a reassuring message that the team is “working together to get you moving.” When a human agent finally comes on the line, he apologizes and explains that he will send the car a “suggestion.” The car ignores it. “That’s not taking my suggestion here, so I’m gonna have to work on another one,” the agent says. Pizzichillo offers his own fix, asking whether the car could simply turn left and go back the way it came. The video does not show how, or when, the ride finally ended.
Why the word “suggestion” caught fire
Most riders assume someone, somewhere, can take the wheel. The clip shows something different: remote staff nudging the software with proposals, and the software deciding for itself whether to accept them. That single word drew more reaction than the stranded car.
“You know its bad when they refer to it as a ‘suggestion’ and not an override,” one commenter wrote, in a reply with more than 26,000 likes. Another summed it up as “very futuristic to be held hostage by a car.” A third, planning a work trip to Phoenix, said the video had ended any thought of trying a robotaxi.
Others went straight for the support line. One top comment, liked more than 9,000 times, simply quoted the agent: “It’s not taking my suggestion.”
The numbers behind the joke
Waymo, the self-driving company owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, runs paid robotaxi service in 10 US metro areas, with 3,871 vehicles on the road and about 500,000 paid rides a week as of June 2026. That works out to roughly 71,000 rides a day (500,000 divided by seven).
Set that against one Atlanta clip: 3.4 million plus 1.8 million is about 5.2 million views across two apps, or more than ten times the number of rides the whole fleet gives in a typical week. A single stuck car, filmed by a first-time rider, now has a far bigger audience than the service itself.
For Pizzichillo, whose Instagram usually features sermon clips and everyday life, it is his first big viral hit. His reel is still up on his own account, @loupizzichillo, where the comment count stood at about 3,800 on Friday night, three days after posting.
Further reading
Image: Votpuske, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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