This week in robocar snafus: A Waymo in Phoenix went a little haywire recently, and its passenger says he was late getting to a flight because the car refused to stop circling the same parking lot."This autonomous vehicle said to heck with GPS, [and] the car just went around in circles, eight circles at that," rider Mike Johns wrote in a December post on LinkedIn. "Is someone pulling a prank, is this car hacked? It felt like a scene in a sci fi thriller." In the video that accompanied Johns's post, you can see the Waymo making fairly quick turns and going around and around the same parking lot. Meanwhile, a customer support agent can be heard coming on over the car's soundsystem and saying, "it appears the car might be experiencing some routing issue."CNN picked up the story, and apparently the customer support team was able to get the car to "find a spot" and pull over. Apparently, Johns stayed in the car (I wouldn't!), and the Waymo proceeded to get him to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix in time for his flight. The company told CNN that the incident only resulted in a five-minute delay in Johns's trip.Still, it's an unsettling incident that wouldn't happen with a human driver, and kind of makes you wish the cars came with some sort of "kill switch" or something so you could escape if it started to malfunction.Amusingly, Johns is actually an artifical intelligence consultant, and when it comes to autonomous vehicles, he tells CNN, "It’s the future of where things are going so I’m definitely a part of that."Waymo further said that it completed a "regularly scheduled maintenance event" on its software after this incident, which should solve for any future, similar problems.We don't have an explanation, though, for what the problem was. Did the car not "see" an exit from the parking lot, or because the lot itself wasn't part of its pre-programmed map, did it not understand where it was?Here in SF, our Waymos aren't yet allowed to go to the airport — something the company is clearly working on — so they aren't yet able to make us late for our flights.But it should be noted that a human Uber, Lyft, or cab driver can be told to hurry, in as much as they can within the law, when you're running late. Not so much for a robot that's still new to freeway driving.Previously: Waymo Takes Another Step Toward Entering Airport Taxi Market