A Los Angeles-based tech entrepreneur was trapped in a malfunctioning self-driving car for several minutes last month, nearly causing him to miss a flight, he said.

Mike Johns was driving a Waymo autonomous car en route to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix when the vehicle repeatedly circled a parking lot, circling eight times, while he was on the phone seeking help from the company.

“I put on my seatbelt. I can’t get out of the car. Was this hacked? What’s going on?” In a video he posted on LinkedIn three weeks ago, he can be heard telling a Waymo representative. “I feel like I’m in the movies. Is someone playing a prank on me? And I have to Catch a flight.”

Johns initially believed it was a prank, he told the Guardian. “I have a lot of smart friends who work in tech… (I thought), maybe it was my friend,” he said. But as the vehicle continued to circle an island in the parking lot, he knew there was a real problem. “This car has a defect.”

He felt dizzy as it continued to circle the site in a moment that he said “felt like a scene in a sci-fi thriller.” The Waymo representative advised him to open his app when she tried to stop the vehicle, but said in the video she had “no way to control the car.”

The problem was resolved after a few minutes, Waymo said in a statement. He ultimately managed to catch his flight from Arizona to Southern California, which he said was fortunately delayed. But he was frustrated with the experience and said he couldn’t tell whether the representative he spoke to was human or AI.

“It’s just another case of today’s digital world. “A half-baked product and no one meets the customer, the consumer, in the middle,” Johns, who describes himself as a futurist knowledgeable about artificial intelligence, told CBS Los Angeles.

The experience was harrowing, Johns said. “I was stunned. It just reminded me more of the ghost in the machine. You’ll hear people talk about autonomous vehicles or driverless cars – I would call it ‘peopleless cars.'” He had used Waymo before and said his recent experience wouldn’t stop him from using self-driving cars in the future, but there are still things to clarify.

“As a futurist, I feel like everything is going in the right direction here, so you might as well get there first,” Johns said. “We just have mishaps that need stitches.”

Waymo told the Guardian that the “looping event” had been resolved through a regularly scheduled software update. Johns was not billed for the trip, the company said.

The company offers autonomous driving services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin and completed more than 4 million fully autonomous rides last year, according to Waymo. While the company’s vehicles have completed millions of trips safely, high-profile incidents, including a Waymo self-driving car that killed a dog and a collision that injured a cyclist, have raised concerns.

For Johns, the experience provided useful insights for a book he is writing about how artificial intelligence will impact jobs. “I became my own case study,” he said.