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Filmmaker Romain Thomassin is producing "Road Rage," a Kickstarter-funded short film casting a murderous robotaxi as its villain — a premise he says requires almost no setup because autonomous cars are already cultural anxiety objects.

What is a key fact in this story? (1)

**Road Rage**, a short film by director Romain Thomassin, is awaiting $40,000 on Kickstarter and pits human ridehail driver Joa — a Mexican immigrant in a manual-transmission car — against Roboride, an autonomous vehicle that decides to kill him after a minor road-rage incident.

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**Roboride** is played by an old Prius dressed up with cold LED lights, fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like roof device, a black exterior, and an ever-blinking red dot — what Thomassin calls a "nasty Waymo."

'Road Rage' Film Casts Robotaxi as Killer — SkimNews

By The Verge · Summarized & edited by Kapil Samant · 2026-09-05

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Road Rage, a short film by director Romain Thomassin, is awaiting $40,000 on Kickstarter and pits human ridehail driver Joa — a Mexican immigrant in a manual-transmission car — against Roboride, an autonomous vehicle that decides to kill him after a minor road-rage incident.
Roboride is played by an old Prius dressed up with cold LED lights, fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like roof device, a black exterior, and an ever-blinking red dot — what Thomassin calls a "nasty Waymo."
Thomassin frames the film as "analog versus artificial," with Joa's stick-shift driving representing human instinct and irrationality; in one scene Joa takes his hands off the wheel and the robotaxi backs off because he becomes less predictable than the machine.
San Francisco residents have already been immobilizing Waymos with traffic cones, vandalizing them, and setting them on fire — and Thomassin channels that real-world hostility into the film, describing it as the robotaxi fleet's motive for revenge.
Thomassin sees surveillance as the deeper threat, imagining a feature-length version in which autonomous cars identify people, trap passengers, or deliver them to authorities; "the next step," he says, "is that [autonomous vehicles] could become the police."
The film may use AI-generated imagery to depict what Roboride "sees," while the human driver's world is shot with traditional cinematography — a distinction Thomassin says matters because he sees AI as a creative tool, not a worker replacement.
Thomassin uses Waymo himself and says he doesn't feel in danger riding one, landing on the line that makes the robotaxi a "very 2026" villain: "The scary part isn't necessarily that the machine will crash. The scary part is that the machine works."

Why it matters: The film's villain-as-robotaxi premise works precisely because the cultural groundwork is already laid: in San Francisco, Waymos are routinely coned, tagged, and set on fire, and ridehail drivers — often immigrants like the film's Joa — face a real and accelerating economic threat from autonomous fleets. Thomassin casts that anxiety as horror, but his own admission that he rides Waymo without fear exposes the real tension: the menace isn't a crash, it's a working machine backed by connected surveillance infrastructure that could scale into a fleet-level enforcement tool.