Robotaxis enter their villain era: New short film casts autonomous car as killer

The film pits Joa, a ridehail driver in a manual-transmission car, against Roboride, an autonomous vehicle that takes a minor road-rage incident very personally. As director Romain Thomassin describes in his synopsis, Roboride lightly clips Joa’s mirror, Joa gives it the finger, and the car decides to kill him.

Thomassin told The Verge that the planned villain is an old Prius transformed with cold LED lights across the front, fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like device on the roof, a black exterior, and a menacing ever-blinking red dot. He calls the intended result a “nasty Waymo.” The chase itself will feature real cars, real actors, and real stunts, aiming for a gritty 1970s feel.

What makes Joa the good guy, Thomassin said, is his instinct and authenticity. In one scene, Joa has an unexpected conversation with his passengers. “This type of human interaction doesn’t happen in a robotaxi,” the director said. Joa is a Mexican immigrant trying to make a living driving in an increasingly expensive San Francisco, and robotaxis already compete with ridehail drivers, just as generative AI competes with workers in Thomassin’s own industry.

Beyond job displacement, Thomassin said he is particularly unnerved by the surveillance capabilities of autonomous cars, which are covered in cameras and sensors. He envisioned a dystopian version where robotaxis identify people, trap passengers inside, or deliver them to authorities. “The next step is that [autonomous vehicles] could become the police,” he said, adding that because robotaxis operate as connected fleets, the threat could scale. “Imagine an army rising up.”

Robotaxis also make unusually good revenge-movie villains because people already treat them as adversaries. Thomassin pointed to Waymos being immobilized with traffic cones, tagged, vandalized, and even set on fire in San Francisco. “They are being bullied,” he said. In Road Rage, that mistreatment becomes motivation: “They want to take revenge.” The car learns road rage by absorbing the behavior of human drivers, making it a very 2026 update to Stephen King’s killer car in Christine. Thomassin acknowledged he does not think robotaxis are inherently evil, but as movie villains, they come preloaded with tension.