A new short film imagines a San Francisco car chase where the other driver isn’t human — and the car may be trying to kill you.

That a robotaxi can now be cast as the villain with almost no explanation says something about the present moment.

Road Rage, the planned short film awaiting $40,000 on Kickstarter to fund production, leans into all of it.

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, according to a synopsis by its director, Romain Thomassin. Roboride lightly clips Joa’s mirror. Joa gives it the finger.

The AI bad guy will be played by an old Prius transformed with cold LED lights across the front — à la Tesla — fake cameras, a spinning lidar-like device on the roof, a black exterior, and a menacing, ever-blinking red dot.

”— Road Rage director Romain Thomassin“What makes Joa the good guy is not only his instinct but also his authenticity,” Thomassin said, noting a scene in which the character has an unexpected conversation with his passengers.

” Thomassin doesn’t actually think robotaxis are inherently evil.

But as a movie villain, they come preloaded with tension. For one thing, they’re replacing the kind of worker his protagonist represents. Joa is a Mexican immigrant trying to make a living driving in an increasingly expensive San Francisco.

1/4Guerilla posters for Road Rage. Image: Grace Vincent / Road RageThen there’s surveillance. Autonomous cars are covered in cameras and sensors, constantly observing the streets — and people — around them.

In Road Rage, that anxiety is pushed toward dystopia. There’s a brief encounter involving immigration enforcement, and Thomassin imagines a feature-length version in which autonomous cars identify people, trap passengers inside, or deliver them directly to authorities. “The next step is that [autonomous vehicles] could become the police,” he said.

And because robotaxis operate as connected fleets, the threat can scale beyond one vehicle. Robotaxis also make unusually good revenge-movie villains because people already treat them like adversaries. “They are being bullied,” he said.

” Thomassin describes Roboride as absorbing the behavior it observes around it — including the behavior of human drivers. That makes Roboride a very 2026 update to the killer car idea in Stephen King’s Christine. There, the menace is supernatural.