Originally published at: Waymo Robotaxis Offer a Glimpse of the Future of Driving - TidBITS
In 1993, science fiction author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Gibson’s quote applies perfectly to Waymo’s robotaxis: self-driving cars that ferry you around like a driverless Uber or Lyft.
In fact, Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, is barely distributed at all right now. You can only hail a Waymo in Phoenix (where it provides service across 315 square miles), San Francisco (55 square miles), and Los Angeles (80 square miles), with Atlanta, Austin, and Miami coming soon. Even in its markets, Waymo currently operates only on city streets, not freeways, limiting its ability to handle many longer or commonly used routes.
Riding with Waymo
Evenly distributed or not, Waymo offers a clear view of the future of driving. Tonya and I spent part of the holiday break visiting my sister in the Bay Area, and she treated us and our son Tristan to a pair of Waymo rides in San Francisco that were as much about experiencing the technology as getting around the city. A decade ago, we took our first ride with a now-defunct ridesharing service called Sidecar; I was amused and somewhat chagrined to discover that our article had a roughly similar title and began with the same quote (see “Travelling to the Future, on the Internet,” 24 June 2014).
We’ve come a long way since then, but the overall experience wasn’t too dissimilar, apart from the lack of a driver. Just as we had in 2014, my sister pulled up the Waymo app and asked for a pickup, which took just a few minutes.
We happened to be at a hotel, so the only confusion was that three other Waymos were doing dropoffs and pickups in the same block. Although all Waymos look identical—they’re white Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs—they have a dome on top that houses the sensor array (including the all-important 360º LiDAR sensors) and displays the initials of the person who hailed the vehicle. Waymo operates about 300 cars in San Francisco and said it averaged about 4300 trips per day in May 2024.
The rides were essentially perfect. The car navigated San Francisco’s hilly and crowded streets with aplomb. At various times, it backed up to let an SUV in front of us back into a parking spot, paused at an intersection to let a jaywalker finish crossing, and correctly avoided a bike messenger swerving in and out of parked cars.
The app experience was as expected and much like using Uber or Lyft, albeit with buttons that let us control the music and ask the car to pull over. We didn’t try the latter, but I imagine it’s so people feel like they can always get out if necessary.
During the rides, we were agog, chattering about how it was fascinating to watch the wheel turn on its own, how it turned the wipers on for us since it didn’t need to see out the windshield, and how it dealt with each slightly unusual traffic situation. We also enjoyed the car’s screens, which showed our route along with real-time representations of the vehicles and pedestrians surrounding it. Thanks to LiDAR, the car could discern far more about what was happening around us than we could. I’ve driven in San Francisco a handful of times and would have found navigating the traffic conditions somewhat stressful.
The trips to and from where we had parked our car cost $11 and $17; the difference was due to surge pricing for the second trip. A comparable Uber or Lyft ride would have been priced similarly.
Waymo Safety
Of course, Waymo is not perfect, and there have been well-publicized mistakes, such as the Waymo that drove in circles in a parking lot for a few minutes (though I wonder why the guy didn’t tap the Pull Over button) and Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler’s complaint about Waymos not stopping for him in a crosswalk.
However, these missteps highlight an important advantage of autonomous systems: once Waymo fixes the bug that caused the parking lot circling or tweaks the system to do better with crosswalks, the entire fleet benefits from those improvements. If only teenagers could be updated so effortlessly!
It’s already doing much better than humans. A study by the global reinsurance company SwissRe examined Waymo’s road incidents across the 25 million miles it has driven and compared the number of incidents that could have resulted in a liability claim against the rate of claims by human drivers in the same cities. Waymo had an 88% reduction in property damage claims and a 92% reduction in bodily injury claims—it was involved in just nine property damage claims and two bodily injury claims, one of which was caused by a human driver who was fleeing police, ran a red light, and hit the Waymo, another car, and a pedestrian.
Waymo is expanding slowly and cautiously, probably as much from the worry about bad PR as the need to learn new environments and situations. I’m looking forward to seeing where we’re at in another decade. With luck, the technology will be far more evenly distributed, including in places with lousy winter weather.
In the meantime, if you get a chance to use Waymo in Phoenix, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, I strongly encourage you to do so. It’s magical.
But realistically, Waymo and other companies are absolutely building systems that generalize and scale. Every car contributes sensor data back to the system so other cars can use it, and the cars are designed to deal with on-the-ground situations. They’re far from perfect, but the rate of improvement is significant.