Waymo's self-driving cars are having trouble shutting down, so they spend a lot of money to hire DoorDash delivery people to come to the rescue.

According to foreign media TechCrunch, as a self-driving giant owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, Waymo's self-driving cars have been operated with people in 6 cities. Recently, they have been embarrassed by a low-level problem - if the passenger accidentally fails to close the door, the vehicle will be directly paralyzed and unable to continue driving. To solve this problem, Waymo actually teamed up with the food delivery platform DoorDash to hire delivery people to visit and close the doors.

According to a post on the Reddit platform, a DoorDash delivery driver received a special order: no need to deliver food, he only had to drive less than a mile to the designated location, close the door of a Waymo driverless car, and he would be paid $6.25. After confirmation, he would get an additional $5. This outrageous scene triggered ridicule from netizens, with one comment jokingly saying, "This is the real 'customs' order delivery."

Waymo and DoorDash have confirmed to TechCrunch that the news is true, saying that this is a pilot project carried out by both parties in Atlanta to improve the efficiency of self-driving fleet operations. It is reported that the cooperation between the two parties began at the beginning of this year, and the closed-door service is only part of the cooperation. In October last year, the two launched an autonomous food delivery service in Phoenix, with Waymo autonomous vehicles delivering food and daily necessities to users.

For Waymo, paying someone to close the door is really a helpless move: once the driverless car detects that the door is not closed, it will suspend all services for safety reasons. Not only will it be unable to accept new orders, but it may also block traffic. Therefore, paying to solve the problem is far more cost-effective than leaving the vehicle idle for a long time. It is worth noting that this is not the first time Waymo has asked for help for car door problems. In Los Angeles, it cooperated with roadside assistance platform Honk to hire relevant personnel to close the door for up to $24, which is more than twice the pay of a delivery driver in Atlanta.

It is reported that Waymo plans to equip future models with automatic door closing functions to fundamentally solve this problem.