A DoorDasher Got Paid $11.25 to Close a Waymo Door — Welcome to the Robotaxi Economy | Taha Abbasi

The Most Absurd Gig of the Robotaxi Era

Taha Abbasi covers frontier technology with a mix of enthusiasm and realism, and sometimes the robotaxi industry delivers stories that perfectly capture the messy reality of automation. Case in point: a DoorDasher was offered $11.25 to close a Waymo robotaxi door that was left open by a passenger.

The incident, reported by The Verge, highlights a problem that no amount of AI sophistication has solved: what happens when a passenger exits a robotaxi and doesn’t close the door? The vehicle can’t drive with an open door. There’s no human driver to lean over and pull it shut. So Waymo dispatched a gig worker — via DoorDash — to perform the remarkably analog task of closing a car door.

The Hidden Human Labor Behind Autonomy

This story is funny, but Taha Abbasi sees it as illustrative of a deeper truth about autonomous technology: full autonomy is much harder than it looks, and the gaps are often filled by invisible human labor. Waymo employs remote operators who can intervene when vehicles get confused. Tesla has human labelers training its neural networks. Every autonomous system depends on human support infrastructure that rarely gets discussed.

The door-closing incident is a physical manifestation of this dependency. Waymo’s vehicles can navigate complex urban environments, but they can’t solve the simple physical problem of a door left ajar. It’s a humbling reminder that robotaxi expansion requires solving thousands of these edge cases — and many solutions involve humans, not algorithms.

Novel Job Creation

As one commenter joked: “So you’re saying we can create jobs if we call a bunch of Waymos, open their doors, and then walk away?” The humor aside, Taha Abbasi notes that autonomous vehicles are genuinely creating new categories of work — remote operators, fleet maintenance technicians, mapping specialists, and apparently, door closers.

This isn’t necessarily bad. Every major technology transition creates new jobs alongside the ones it eliminates. But it does challenge the narrative that robotaxis will be purely automated operations with no human involvement. The reality is messier, more human, and frankly more entertaining.

What Tesla’s Approach Avoids

Interestingly, Tesla’s robotaxi design — the Cybercab — features gull-wing doors that open and close automatically. Whether intentional or coincidental, this design choice eliminates the exact problem Waymo just solved with $11.25 and a DoorDasher. As Taha Abbasi has observed, Tesla tends to solve operational problems through vehicle design rather than operational workarounds.

The broader lesson: autonomous vehicle companies need to think about every aspect of the passenger experience, including the mundane physical interactions that human drivers handle effortlessly. The devil, as always, is in the details — and sometimes those details cost $11.25.

---

About the Author: Taha Abbasi is a technology executive, CTO, and applied frontier tech builder. Read more on Grokpedia | YouTube: The Brown Cowboy | tahaabbasi.com