My first thru fourth rides inside a *Waymo*

It wasn't until the second day I was in LA last weekend when I realized oh shit! They have Waymo here! I've should give one a try.

I've been obsessed with the idea of self-driving cars for decades, having grown up reading WIRED and OMNI magazines. I assumed up until about ten years ago we'd have more robot drivers than regular cars on the road any day now.

It wasn't until I taught my kid how to drive over the course of 2020-2021 that I figured out self-driving cars actually had an insurmountable challenge before they could ever happen in the real world. Going through the whole process of teaching her what I was doing, I suddenly realized I'm always monitoring a hundred different things whenever I drive and it's hard to impart this on a teen with zero experience.

I've worked around the software industry for years and I can't imagine a 100% reliable self-driving program that can take into account not just the dozens of vehicles surrounding you and what each car might do next, but also the incredible variability in every street and curb and intersection since we have pretty flimsy road building standards in the US. Every time you drive a car today, there's a good chance you'll experience a situation you've never encountered exactly before, but it's similar enough to something you've done, so you figure it out on the fly, and it works out.

Can software ever do that?

The first ride: total insanity

I was in Los Angeles, doing a blasphemous thing on a Sunday morning, which was going for a two-mile walk across town. I ended up at a cool coffee shop to grab some breakfast, but I wanted to get back to my hotel for a big day ahead, so I called my first Waymo in the app.

It said it'd be there in 5 minutes to pick me up at a nearby intersection, then I got a few messages saying I wasn't standing in the right place, so I moved to another, safer, street corner, but was told to move back to the spot I originally launched the app. I don't think it's smart to pick up a rider at a four way stop being actively used by others, so I backtracked up the street a bit while ignoring the app's protests, and the approaching Waymo stopped for me where I wanted before the intersection and I got in.

It whisked me away quickly and I started freaking out in my head.

Holy shit, it's working.

Holy crap, there really is no driver!

Holy shit, we're really in the road with regular people that could be killed by this (and me too in the process)!

I imagine my first thoughts could have been published a hundred years ago in a newspaper.

Oh my god, where is the horse?!

How is this thing moving without my buggy whip?!

What will the city will look like when these new fangled things show up everywhere!

Overall, the ride was whisper quiet, the car drove cautiously, but being an EV, it was accelerating a bit quicker than I expected.

It didn't take long to witness the software do something in an unusual situation as we approached an intersection where a kid was riding a bike. I happened to be filming a quick video to show a friend when it happened.

Personally, I would have slowed down as I approached, given the cyclist there, but the car jammed the brakes and jerked the wheel to avoid the kid at the last moment, then proceeded to make its planned left turn, but the driver coming from the opposite direction was approaching slowly so we awkwardly turned behind the other car.

Not exactly elegant.

But my hotel was just a block up and it was a fast, cheap ride that saved me time, so maybe it had some promise?

Rides number 2 and 3: from nervousness to mundanity

I met up with friends who were also in from out of town and had never tried a Waymo and they were looking forward to it. Since it was three of us in total, I took the front passenger seat and for some reason this felt even more dangerous on our trip to LA's BMO stadium about 3 miles away.

For this trip, we watched as the car dodged and weaved through small city side streets, usually driving cautiously but sometimes passing double-parked cars in narrow avenues. It was obvious the car was limited to specific areas by the City of Los Angeles as our route became hella circuitous.

But we got to experience something really interesting when a distant siren sound started to approach us. The car came to a stop before we could see an emergency vehicle, and it waited as we watched the center screens show a car with flashing lights on it go past.

When the fire truck was gone, we resumed our trip and got to the stadium uneventfully.

The ride back was much the same, though given we walked out of a stadium with 16,000 other people looking to head home, traffic was gridlocked in all directions for blocks and after waiting 10 minutes for a Waymo we walked several blocks away from the stadium and told the Waymo where it could find us and we quickly got a ride back to our hotel.

On this third trip, my friends called the Waymo themselves because they wanted to control the aux cable as we got so used to how you could pair your phone's music to the car and control the temperature inside.

The trip home included another emergency vehicle and the car responded well, then resumed after an ambulance passed. It made a few major road crossings that would have made me nervous, but looking at the screens I could tell its own LIDAR sensors could see further and around parked cars in ways I couldn't. I was starting to get impressed.

My last ride home to LAX: I forgot it was autonomous entirely

I had to grab my stuff and head to the airport in the evening so I called my last Waymo from the hotel and it showed up promptly. I noticed it would only send me to LAX's new transit center where the bus and rail systems meet a couple miles from the main terminals, but free buses eventually whisk you away so you can catch your flight. I still can't imagine a self driving car navigating the most extreme circumstances of an airport departures area, where people are constantly stopping, blocking, and getting out of cars all over the place.

I spent my last Waymo trip looking up my flight and terminal info, as well as how to catch one of the LAX terminal buses and barely looked up from my phone during the whole trip. I already completely forgot what I was sitting in. I rode an LAX bus to my final terminal and it was fine.

Final thoughts

• I couldn't believe how quickly I went from nervous apprehension to forgetting I was in a moving car with no driver, all in the course of a half a day.
• Waymo is headed to Portland soon and people are freaking out about it locally, but I honestly can't wait as I think it'll be less chaotic than Los Angeles or San Francisco in terms of road layouts.
• Waymo cars are generally a lot safer than human drivers and are doing a way better job than I ever imagined after having experienced a few rides myself. I have to eat my words a bit on where I thought this technology was at.
• I know Waymo employs human watcher/drivers and at one point in the four trips I saw a message on the screen saying Waymo was "taking over" for a short while but we were driving down a street normally and I don't know why they sent the message or what they did since the driving characteristics didn't change at all.
• After experiencing a few fire trucks and ambulances interacting with a Waymo while I was inside, I don't think even an army of humans would be enough to take over as quickly and as often as it would seem. I suspect the amount of actual human oversight is surprisingly low.
• That said, last year while I was in San Francisco driving my own car, surrounded by Waymos, I noticed at one point traffic was illegally going around some double-parked cars and eventually each Waymo car followed regular people doing it, so I kind of knew not all of this was software, and probably humans that kicked in after cars were stuck for a couple minutes without movement.
• I've watched tons of videos of people inside a Waymo getting in weird situations and the software does a good job of being especially cautious around cyclists and pedestrians, so much so that I would prefer to ride my bike in a city filled with Waymos over one filled with normal cars.
• While driving around a narrow street with bad visibility, I did think if we hit something, do I as the rider need to stick around? Am I at all liable for what the car does?
• The pricing on it I would guess is about 25-50% less than a Uber or Lyft ride, and maybe that's artificially low due to investment money, but it seems like it should be cheaper than human options.
• There are ample warnings everywhere that you are constantly being video recorded while you're inside a Waymo and since humans can do the worst possible things, I bet there's a supercut of people having sex inside Waymos somewhere on a hard drive under a desk at Waymo.
• I generally don't like the whole "robots taking jobs" aspects of tech "progress", but even though I love to drive cars personally, I don't think being an uber driver is a fulfilling, lucrative job that treats their drivers well. I know uber twists the knobs so drivers barely make enough money to keep doing it. I honestly don't know if gig driving is a job worth saving.
• No driver means no creepy guy hassling riders for their phone number and I think that's really an underreported upside to Waymo for many folks.
• I thought of my old friend Jerry Michalski and how maybe 15 years ago he wrote about how self-driving cars would someday be so mundane that they'd offer services while you're in them to differentiate which one you use, like a haircut from a barber in the car, or a mixed drink from a bartender, or even a dental cleaning while you head to work.
• My favorite joke about Waymos is that the windshield wipers operate whenever it rains, even though that's completely for us, and not them.

In conclusion:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it's better at driving than I thought