Waymo Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go
Back in the 1990s, teenage kids in the New York City suburbs (but, to be clear, not me) used to play a game called “mailbox baseball.” One of them — typically a new driver with maybe a year or two of experience behind the wheel — would pick up some friends and drive around town. The rider in the passenger seat, and potentially one or two in the back, would grab a baseball bat. The driver slowly drives by a mailbox and the bat-wielding kid(s) would take a swing, never leaving the car. In most cases, they’d miss or do minor damage to the mailbox — but not always. Many mailboxes fell prey to mailbox baseball.
And yet, few kids ever got in trouble for such things. This was an era before Ring cameras and cell phones, and kids knew not to rat out their friends and classmates. But that world is gone. Today, there are lots of ways you can get caught. And as two 15-year-olds learned last week, that can happen even if no one notices what you’re doing.
On July 6, 2026, police in San Mateo, California removed the pair of teenagers from a stopped car. The cops, per the police department’s Facebook post, removed the kids from the car and “determined they were shooting Orbeez from the car as they sipped on afternoon libations” — that is, the pair was drunk and shooting BB guns loaded with waterlogged gel packets at, well, anything two drunk teenagers normally would shoot at. That’s not legal — putting the underage drinking aside, shooting any sort of high-speed projectile at unsuspecting passersby can cause a ton of damage. Plus, they could have shot their own eyes out. There’s really nothing controversial, at all, about the police making the apprehension.
But the way the police found out about the crime in process? They weren’t tipped off by a neighbor or the like. They found out from the car that was driving the kids around.
The two teens decided to take a Waymo — a driverless robotaxi — in their gallivant around San Mateo. That’s sensible, as 15-year-olds can’t legally drive (although in this case, “legally” doesn’t seem to be a big barrier to entry) and they wouldn’t want the driver to rat them out. Waymos have no such problem — they’re autonomous vehicles with no cabby to tell on the scofflaws in the back. Or, at least, that’s what these kids probably thought. But they were wrong. As ABC News reported, the Waymo they were in detected the kids’ potentially criminal activity and contacted the police itself — and then stopped the car until the police could arrive to investigate. While NPR and others flagged that the incident sparked some privacy concerns, most reports acknowledge that drinking in Waymos and throwing things (and by extension, shooting toy guns) out of their windows are violations of the cars’ terms of service and a bad idea generally — particularly if you’re under age.
How much trouble the kids got in has gone unreported, but the police said that the kids did something right, despite the overall bad judgment: they didn’t drive drunk. Per the PD’s Facebook post, “the Waymo might have been the smartest idea yet, because driving impaired would’ve made this so much worse.”
Bonus fact: Mailboxes exist for efficiency purposes. Before they were widespread, according to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, “letter carriers knocked on the door and waited patiently for someone to answer. Efficiency experts estimated that each carrier lost an hour and a half each day just waiting for patrons to come to the door.” To account for this, in 1923, the postal service mandated that all U.S. residences have a compliant mailbox or postal slot — otherwise, the post office won’t deliver mail there. Those rules have been updated since, but still exist today.
From the Archives: The Post Office That’s Underwater: It actually is an underwater post office.