Robotaxis enter their villain era
It’s Bullitt meets Christine meets Waymo.
A new short film imagines a San Francisco car chase where the other driver isn’t human — and the car may be trying to kill you. That a robotaxi can now be cast as the villain with almost no explanation says something about the present moment. Autonomous cars have gone from sci-fi curiosities to fixtures in some American cities, where they’ve become stand-ins for anxieties about AI job displacement, Big Tech surveillance, and machines making decisions once left to humans.
Road Rage, the planned short film awaiting $40,000 on Kickstarter to fund production, leans into all of it. The film pits Joa, a ridehail driver in a manual-transmission car, against Roboride, an autonomous vehicle that takes a minor road-rage incident very personally, according to a synopsis by its director, Romain Thomassin. Roboride lightly clips Joa’s mirror. Joa gives it the finger. The car...
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