Waymo’s Self-Driving Robotaxis Are Awesome. Here’s How.

• Unlike other trendy technologies, self-driving taxis appear to be real taxis.
• You can now take Waymo’s software-driven taxis in San Francisco and Phoenix. They work like an Uber.
• Waymo’s robot taxis aren’t perfect and there are very reasonable concerns about them. But also: these are autonomous taxis that really work!

It’s easy to shit on technology. We – I – do it all the time.

Sometimes it’s because the technology doesn’t work the way I want it to. Sometimes it’s schadenfreude about a trendy thing that falls flat. Sometimes we just feel like the technology we all depend on can harm us in ways we don’t understand and can’t control.

But also: sometimes technology reminds you that technology can be awesome, in the darn sense that some of us had about this stuff.

That’s exactly how I felt after my last trip to San Francisco, when I took several rides in Waymo’s robotaxis.

Partly that’s because the technology is…amazing. You’re really in a car, driving around town, with no one in the driver’s seat. Software and sensors take care of everything.

And partly because technology already seems so… normal. You order a Waymo through an app, just like an Uber or Lyft. It appears, you go in, it takes you where you want to go and you come out.

Yes, my 13-year-old son and I spent the first few minutes in our first Waymo texting friends and family: OMG I’M IN A CAR TAXI. We also documented it on social media, of course.

We also felt a bit of the excitement you get when you first sit on a roller coaster and have that internal debate: Is it safe? It has to be safe, otherwise they wouldn’t let you do it, would they? But seriously, is it safe?

But after those first few minutes of novelty, we went back to doing what we always do in an Uber or Lyft: fooling around on our phones, looking out the window, and not wasting time thinking about who or what. , led us.

Which, to me, is really the most amazing part: this thing is here, now, and you can… just use it.

At least some people can. Waymo, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has a few hundred self-driving cars roaming San Francisco, and access to them is still limited by a waiting list and geography. You can’t have a Waymo pick you up at San Francisco International Airport, for example, or take you across the Bay Bridge to Oakland.

In Phoenix, where Waymo first launched consumer access, there are about the same number of cars, but no waiting list. And now it’s starting to roll out in Los Angeles and Austin.

We’ve been hearing about self-driving taxis forever, but they’re just starting to become a reality.

So even though Waymo claims to take tens of thousands of rides per week, even the most tech-savvy people I talk to haven’t taken any yet.

And it’s reasonable to have concerns about this technology as it rolls out. Waymo’s rival Cruise halted its service last fall after a series of incidents, including a horrific one where a self-driving Cruise dragged a pedestrian who had been hit by a car driven by a human.

Self-driving technology also poses a clear problem for humans who rely on ride-sharing services to make a living. (On my previous trip to San Francisco, one of my Uber drivers told me that he had once been a recruiter at Amazon and had lost his job in one of the recent rounds of layoffs at Amazon.)

And to be honest, I’m not even sure I would still order a Waymo if I had the chance. For now, beyond the novelty, the big advantage for me is that the cars in the fleet – electric Jaguars – are comfortable and clean. And that the cost per ride is about the same as an Uber Comfort (one tier higher than the base Uber robot.

But there’s no reason to believe that cars will stay intact, and prices will stay low, as these things become more widespread. (Waymo doesn’t disclose financial data, and the company wouldn’t tell me if it makes money on each trip. I’m guessing it doesn’t, for now; we know Waymo has invested billion in this project since its beginnings as a Google project in 2009.)

Still, I can think of all sorts of uses for Waymo – right now. Like using it for food delivery – which is happening in Phoenix, via Uber Eats. Maybe it’s for people who believe a robot is more reliable than a human driver – at least we know a Waymo won’t do it watch TikTok while driving on the highway like a Lyft driver did when I was in the backseat a few years ago.

Or maybe it’s just for people who prefer not to interact with another human while in a taxi. That’s what David Margines, Waymo’s director of product management, says is the service’s biggest draw for customers right now. “It’s their own space,” he says.

Waymo’s self-driving cars aren’t perfect

Yes, there are still some issues with Waymo, at least in the trips I’ve taken recently. The first is just figuring out how to get into the thing: When your Waymo arrives, you unlock its doors with your phone, but only once it goes to a very specific location that Waymo knows, and you don’t know it. not.

Which led, on several occasions, to a slow and awkward dance between me and the robot car. He would stop when I approached but wouldn’t let me in because he wasn’t exactly where he was supposed to be. Then I moved away, then he moved towards his target point still unknown to me. Then I would walk in and it would stop – but I still wouldn’t let myself in.

On one of my trips, this happened on a particularly narrow and winding street in San Francisco. And while my Waymo and I were negotiating, we ended up blocking several cars, including a minivan driver who started honking at us in frustration.

“You can’t honk at a robot,” I told him, not very helpfully. “It doesn’t care.”

Meanwhile, a guy passing by stopped and took out his phone to record the scene. “You can put a cone on it to deactivate it,” he told me spontaneously. Apparently he is right?

Most concerning for me was that on one of my trips – to a Warriors game at the Chase Center arena – at a busy intersection, a Waymo in front of us was not responding to a traffic officer trying to pull it over. pass through a red light. Then another Waymo pulled up alongside and didn’t respond to the cop either. So now three Waymos were sitting there, blocking traffic and waiting for the light. The traffic cop stopped trying to move us and just put his hands above his head in disgust.

I thought this was a well-known and understandable problem for Waymos: of course their software and sensors won’t respond to humans telling them to go around traffic lights! Think about the problems this could cause!

But Margines told me that Waymos are, in fact, supposed to understand human signals like a traffic cop. A Waymo PR guy sent me this clip of Waymo CEO Dmitri Dolgov showing a Waymo doing just that:

But unlike other great technological innovations I’ve seen in the past, does anyone still have a 3D TV in their living room? — I don’t think self-driving technology is going to disappear. I think the people behind the technology will understand its possibilities, its limitations, and where it makes sense and where it doesn’t make sense.

Meanwhile, Cruise reboots, but this time with humans in charge. Elon Musk promises to unveil his robotaxi this summer, and even if your doubts about everything Musk says are well justified, you never know. So I think one way or another we’re going to create a version of this standard for many of us in the near future.

Is it great? I don’t know. But it’s really incredible.