Kickstarter film casts murderous robotaxi as villain — SkimNews
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- Romain Thomassin is directing "Road Rage," a short film that casts a murderous autonomous vehicle as the villain, and is seeking $40,000 on Kickstarter to fund production.
- The film pits Joa, a Mexican immigrant ridehail driver in a manual-transmission car, against Roboride, an autonomous vehicle that decides to kill him after a minor mirror-clipping incident — what Thomassin calls "analog versus artificial."
- Roboride is played by an old Prius fitted with cold LED lights, fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like rooftop device, and a menacing blinking red dot — a look Thomassin describes as "a nasty Waymo."
- Waymo robotaxis have been immobilized with traffic cones, vandalized, and set on fire on San Francisco streets, which Thomassin cites as the real-world mistreatment the film's revenge plot mirrors.
- Thomassin outlines a dystopian progression in a potential feature-length version: autonomous vehicles first observe, then surveil, then "become the police," with the threat scaling because robotaxis operate as connected fleets.
- Despite the film's AI-skeptic themes, the filmmakers are considering using AI-generated imagery to depict what Roboride sees, while shooting the human driver's world with traditional cinematography.
- Thomassin says he signed up for Waymo as soon as he could and uses it regularly without fear — making the robotaxi villain effective, in his view, precisely because the technology actually works.
- The director frames ridehail driving as a stand-in for displacement in his own film industry, noting generative AI competes with filmmakers the same way robotaxis compete with human drivers.
Why it matters: Thomassin's $40,000 Kickstarter film crystallizes a cultural shift: robotaxis have moved from sci-fi curiosity to ready-made movie villain in San Francisco, where real Waymos are already being vandalized and burned. The director — who uses Waymo himself — argues the real anxiety isn't crashes but the surveillance infrastructure those vehicles represent, a tension Hollywood is now packaging for the screen.
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