SAN FRANCISCO — Over the last two years, more and more residents of this tech-friendly city have been testing out Waymo One’s driverless taxis. With each first ride, another story is born of those who have joined a future in which cars are guided by computers.
“I guess it just felt kind of illegal, almost. Like there was something seriously wrong and we were the accomplices. It was so strange to be in a car without a driver. It just made no sense to me,” 18-year-old high school student Mia Fessel told Yahoo News about her maiden Waymo One voyage. “What scared me most about being in a Waymo was watching the [steering] wheel move autonomously. I felt like I needed to grab the wheel and drive for it because I didn’t trust it.”
Fitted with 29 cameras and sensors, Waymo’s white Jaguar I-PACE electric cars are ubiquitous in San Francisco, with roughly 300 vehicles in service (they also operate 400 more in Phoenix and Los Angeles). Because of regulatory hurdles, the robotaxis are limited to traveling within the city limits and in adjacent Daily City. You can’t yet take one to the airport or over the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, but it’s almost impossible to go more than a couple of blocks in the city without seeing one.
Retired mortgage broker Julia Zagatsky, 70, took her first trip in one with a friend who was visiting from France.
“It was a pretty exciting moment to be in a car with no driver. It was something magical. You pretend you have a driver, but you don’t,” she said.
‘Start Ride’
A resident of the East Bay, which doesn’t yet have Waymo service, I decided that after hearing dozens of stories about others’ first rides it was time to try one out for myself. Standing outside SF Jazz, a performance hall in the Hayes Valley neighborhood, I opened the company’s cellphone app and typed in my destination, City Lights bookstore, the famous North Beach haven for poets and writers since the 1950s.
The 2.4-mile trip would take 19 minutes and cost $19.09, the app informed me. I hit “Request Car” and was informed that my ride would be there in one minute.
When the Jaguar wearing a funny hat arrived, another message appeared on my phone, inviting me to open the car’s doors by pressing a button on my screen. Doing so caused the handles to protrude, granting me access to the black leather interior.
Atmospheric music was playing when I got in, perhaps to put nervous first-timers at ease, but you can select playlists in other genres, including rock, jazz, classical, hip-hop and holiday music. A female voice over the car’s speakers guided me through many of the basics, including a reminder to fasten my seatbelt.
“We’ll do all the driving, so please don’t touch the steering wheel or pedals during your ride,” she said. “We may use interior cameras to check on riders, improve our product and more, but our microphones are only on when you’re connected to rider support. So sing your heart out, we can’t hear you.”
Waymo cars seat four people, three in the back and one in the front, but the driver’s seat of the driverless car is off limits.
“My friend forgot to put her seatbelt on and we got a call from customer service,” Fessel said. “It was a human saying that she had to put her seatbelt on. I was impressed by that.”
Safety is one of Waymo’s big selling points.
“The most recent data shows that Waymo's vehicles are involved in 72% fewer injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers,” Waymo public relations manager Anjelica Price-Rocha said in an email. On its website, the company also boasts that in its first 25 million miles of driverless service, it has reported 81% fewer crashes involving airbags than with cars driven by people.
You can know this and still feel somewhat apprehensive as you push the blue “Start Ride” button on the screen in front of you and officially hand the driving duties over to artificial intelligence.
‘They seemed to drive better’
Before the company offered its services to the general public in San Francisco, Waymo spent years mapping every inch of the city’s streets and intersections in test rides, pairing that information with “real-time sensor data and artificial intelligence (AI).”
Hugh O’Connor, 65, a production manager at a publishing company, had grown accustomed to the sight of Waymo cabs long before he decided to try one.
“I’d been seeing these driverless cars in our neighborhood for a long time. We were in a test area. I was convinced that they were safe. They seemed to drive better than people in San Francisco,” he said. “They stop at stop signs.”
As I made my way to City Lights, the responsiveness of the car to its surroundings is what stood out. It slows as other drivers cut into our lane, makes turns with the proper clearance, never exceeds the speed limit or pushes its luck through yellow lights. For experienced city drivers, that ride can feel overly cautious at times, but it’s hard to get upset with AI for not taking more risks.
"The Waymo Driver's perception system takes complex data gathered from its advanced suite of car sensors, and deciphers what's around it using AI — from pedestrians to cyclists, vehicles to construction, and more," the company says on its website. "The Waymo Driver also responds to signs and signals, like traffic light colors and temporary stop signs."
Alphabet has invested billions in Waymo One and plans to expand the service to Atlanta, Austin, Texas, and Miami in the coming year. Over the past 12 months, the number of paid weekly rides jumped from 10,000 to 100,000, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Analysts estimate the company is poised to rake in $150 billion in annual profits from its robotaxis.
But there are also big financial risks. In October 2023, a San Francisco woman was dragged 20 feet by an autonomous taxi operated by Cruise, a company owned by General Motors, after she had been hit by another car and thrown into the path of the robotaxi. Cruise had its operating permits revoked in the city, paid the victim a settlement between $8-$12 million, was fined $1.5 million by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and ordered to pay an additional $500,000 to the Justice Department after admitting to misleading federal regulators about the incident.
In part, that bad press has given many Americans pause about hopping into a driverless vehicle.
“When I posted a video of my first ride [on social media], people in other parts of the country were just a hard no,” O’Connor said.
Labor and climate considerations
Two other considerations that have kept some people in the “hard no” camp are what self-driving taxis mean for workers and for the environment.
Just as quickly as ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft overtook the traditional taxi business, the swift rise of Waymo threatens "the lives and livelihoods of workers across San Francisco," the Service Employees International Union said in a 2023 statement.
Despite its rapid growth, Waymo disputes that claim.
“We take a gradual and incremental approach to introducing our autonomous vehicles to the communities we operate in, and expect to drive alongside human-operated vehicles for years to come,” Price-Rocha said in an email. “We also look forward to all of the new jobs this technology will spur."
Waymo also regularly touts that its fleet is all electric, a fact that it says will help fight climate change.
“With every 150,000 EV trips, Waymo One prevents an estimated 220 tons of carbon emissions weekly,” Price-Rocha wrote.
Left unstated are the carbon emissions that result from relying on the energy-intensive artificial intelligence decisions required to operate its fleet.
‘On the Road’
As my Waymo One glides to the curb in front of the Beat Museum, across from City Lights, the female voice informs me, “You’re here. Please make sure it’s clear before exiting.”
When I step out of the car, it occurs to me how quickly the ride felt normal. After the initial rush of adrenaline wears off and you see first hand just how skilled AI is at navigating tight spaces in busy intersections, it begins to dawn on you that your own brain doesn’t need to focus on those calculations. Nor do you have to endure the stress of being trapped in a car with an impatient or reckless human driver, let alone the dilemma of how much to tip them.
While there are still a lot of unknowns about how the adoption of driverless cars will play out across the country, Waymo’s initial success makes clear that the AI-based future of driving is closer than many people realize. In the meantime, however, there will be trade-offs to consider.
“I think it’s cool that technology is available to us, but I’d rather support humans, so I’d rather order an Uber or a taxi if that’s possible, or take public transportation,” Fessel said.