Robotaxi villain: a short film about a rogue car from San Francisco

Autonomous cars have come a long way — from a sci-fi curiosity to a familiar fixture of the urban landscape in certain American cities. And now they've reached a new role: the cinematic villain. The fact that a robotaxi can now be cast as the chief antagonist with almost no explanation says something about the spirit of the times: driverless cars have become the embodiment of our fears about AI — the fear of losing our jobs, of corporate surveillance, and of machines making decisions that used to be left to people.

The short film Road Rage, which is raising 40,000 dollars on Kickstarter, plays on all of these fears at once. The plot is simple: a driver named Joa, in a car with a manual transmission, runs into an autonomous Roboride vehicle that takes a minor traffic incident far too personally. The robot lightly clips his mirror, Joa flips it the middle finger — and the car decides to kill him. “Analog versus artificial,” is how director Romain Thomassin puts it.

What the villain looks like

The role of the killer car will be played by an old Prius, made over beyond recognition: cold LED strips up front in the Tesla style, prop cameras, a spinning pseudo-lidar on the roof, a black body, and an ominously blinking red dot. Thomassin calls the result a “nasty Waymo.” The chase, meanwhile, will be pointedly old-school — real cars, real actors, real stunts in the style of the car chases of the seventies, but set against the backdrop of present-day San Francisco.

The director doesn't consider robotaxis evil by nature, yet as a movie villain they carry a built-in tension. His protagonist, Joa, is a Mexican immigrant making a living driving for hire in an increasingly expensive city, and driverless cars are already taking customers away from drivers like him. “Driving here is a metaphor for what's happening in filmmaking,” says Thomassin, whose own industry is competing with generative AI.

From watching to control

A separate worry is surveillance. Autonomous cars are festooned with cameras and sensors and are constantly watching the streets and the people on them. That is what frightens the director more than the ride without a human behind the wheel itself. In the feature-length version, he imagines cars that identify people, lock passengers inside, and deliver them to the authorities: observation, surveillance, and then control. “The next step is driverless cars becoming the police,” he says, pointing out that cars linked into a single fleet allow the threat to scale.

Roboride is an updated version of Stephen King's “Christine”: where King's car was possessed by the supernatural, here the evil is thoroughly modern. The car watches people, learns from them, and takes on their worst traits. “On the road, people can be the worst versions of themselves,” the director observes.

The counterweight is Joa and his manual transmission, an embodiment of the human. In one scene he takes his hands off the wheel in front of the car, and it backs off: the human wins by becoming more unpredictable than the algorithm. “Respect your own madness,” Thomassin urges.

Curiously, for all its skepticism the film may itself make use of AI — to show the world through Roboride's eyes, while human reality will be shot in the classic way. The director himself isn't afraid of driverless cars and rides in Waymos. And perhaps that is exactly the point of his 2026-model villain: what's scary isn't that the machine might crash, but that it works.

Source: The Verge