A witness described the fiery crash involving a Waymo in Northeast Atlanta.
“I saw a dark colored Jeep hit one of the Waymo, the Jaguar cars,” recalled Jeffrey Popadiuk.
He saw the collision along Cheshire Bridge on Sunday night. And it wasn’t long after he captured the flames with his phone.
“Within 30 seconds it was flames, like the car was on fire,” said Popadiuk. “I mean tires were on fire and it just kept burning and burning.”
Thankfully the driver of the Jeep able to get out of the car quickly.
“There’s nobody in the Waymo, but so I opened up all the doors to the Jeep and the flames started kind of getting bigger,” remembered Popadiuk.
Atlanta Fire Rescue put out the flames. But the fire has some Waymo customers questioning how they can quickly get out of a Waymo in an emergency - including a fire like this one - even as some riders reported not being able to get out of the cars.
“Most of them do have a mechanical backup where you just pull extra hard on the handle to open them up,” said former Waymo technician Michael Shannon.
And Channel 2 reached out to Waymo today who responded advising riders to pull twice on the door handle to exit the vehicles.
In Sunday’s crash, Popadiuk is thankful no one was inside the Waymo.
“It was a really hard hit,” added Popadiuk.
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