Notes from the Waymo
On self-driving cars, and children
The first time I rode in a self-driving car was in January of this year. I wish I could tell you it was miraculous—and it was miraculous, at least for about the first three minutes—but the most striking thing about my experience was how quickly it started to feel normal.
Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy once observed, “We no longer think of chairs as technology; we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them.” Riding in the Waymo, it was uncanny to watch my brain making this shift in real time; if I didn’t look to the empty driver’s seat and see the wheel spinning of its own accord, I would have forgotten I was in a self-driving vehicle at all.
For the unfamiliar who want a sense of how the service works, here’s a recent video of someone having a similar reaction to their first time in a Waymo:
In this post, I’m going to focus mostly on the Waymo experience and aesthetic, rather than the technology and policies surrounding autonomous vehicles. (For a great overview of those topics by two people with more expertise, I recommend this interview.) Still, here’s some key milestones that may be helpful:
Waymo (originally called the Google Self-Driving Car Project) was founded in 2009 and remains a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.
In 2015, Waymo completed its first fully autonomous ride on public roads, rolling out its current robotaxi services starting in 2019.
Waymo is now completing over 150,000 rides/week in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and Austin. (For comparison, Uber does approximately 130 million rides/week worldwide.1)
And here’s some early safety statistics:
Waymo’s early driving data indicate that riders are 81% less likely to get in a crash where the airbag is deployed (i.e., compared to human drivers in the same city).
Similarly, Waymo’s riders are, to-date, 72% less likely to get in a crash which causes injury.
And in an estimated 25 million total driving miles, Waymos have had 0 fatalities. (For comparison, there is about 1 fatality per 100 million human driving miles—so while promising, this early evidence is not yet definitive.)
Finally, if you’re wondering why it is that Waymos appear to be safer than human drivers, here’s a couple early hints:
Waymos, being cars, need approximately 0 hours of sleep per night. (For comparison, human adults need 7-9 hours, but about 37% of American adults report getting less than this.)
Waymos, being cars, consume approximately 0 alcoholic beverages in their lifetimes. (For comparison, there are 37 alcohol-related driving fatalities per day in the United States.)
Waymos, which navigate the world using a combination of Lidar and 29 cameras, have a 360-degree field of vision. (For comparison, human peripheral vision maxes out at about 210 degrees.)
I’m being a bit tongue-in-cheek with this last set of “statistics” of course—but I hope the point is clear: It stands to reason that Waymos are far more predictable and reliable than humans—and this will only become more true over time. Really, common sense tells us that the mere fact they are out on the roads is an indication self-driving cars are significantly safer than humans; we wouldn’t tolerate their presence otherwise, and their creators wouldn’t be willing to take the risk. Even if you believe that you personally are a safer-than-average driver, you should want more Waymos on the road: There are accidents that even the best driver cannot avoid—and even the most skilled among us can have bad days from fatigue, distraction, and unfamiliar environments.
Do Waymos feel safer? That’s another question. I’ve been in a few car accidents in my life (nothing severe, but sobering experiences nonetheless), and the way I’d answer is like this: In human-caused accidents, one’s sense of danger is almost always delayed. Each time, I’ve been in one, I’ve humming idly along the road, business as usual—and it is only after the skid begins, or after I hear the metal crunch of bumpers, that the adrenaline kicks in and my heart begins to pound. Waymo, by contrast, is in many ways the opposite of this experience: Occasionally, the car might encounter an obstacle or do something odd, and I’ll grip the seat and brace myself for impact. (In one instance, it moved all the way out into the opposite lane to navigate around two double-parked firetrucks.) But every time, the threat signal from my body is a false positive. The machine knows exactly what it’s doing.2
Waymo has clearly made some design choices meant to dispel exactly these feelings of uncertainty. On top of the car is a display which flashes a pedestrian signal when it detects a person nearby (the robotaxi equivalent of eye contact). Inside is a screen which shows a 3D rendering of all the people, objects, and other vehicles around the car.3 Neither of these is strictly necessary for the Waymo to navigate the world, but they go a long way toward putting wary humans at ease.
In my opinion, the strongest positive case for Waymo (aside from the abstract knowledge of safety) is a feeling of ease and smoothness. There are no jerky movements or sudden braking, no inadvertent gridlock. (Waymos always wait patiently until the car in front has exited the intersection.) There is no shitty music being blasted by your driver, no worries about tips and ratings. On my most recent Waymo trip, I sat in the front seat (why not!?) and just listened to a podcast, watching the hills of San Francisco roll by the window. For a moment, I was transported back to the backseat of the minivan on family road trips, a time before cell phones, when my parents would put on an audiobook for hours at a time.
Reflecting on the immense amount of computation underlying this reverie, I thought I caught a glimpse of a better future. This future was one in which sophisticated algorithms, instead of blowing up our devices and constantly tugging on our attention, are simply part of the built environment. I’d hesitate to call this world a utopia; it perhaps lacks some of the wildness and serendipity of the present, and would no doubt come with downsides of its own. But it is on the whole a world of calmness and pleasantness—a world I’d like to live in more of the time than I do.
And yet…
At the end of my most recent trip to San Francisco, I ordered a Lyft to the airport. Frankly, I would have ordered another Waymo had that been an option;4 instead I got Robert.
My journey with Robert seemed somehow to embody everything that is both great and terrible about contemporary rideshare apps. One of the first things he asked me when I got in the car was how much I’d spent on the ride. It turned out that of the fifty-something dollars I’d paid, only eighteen (pre-tip) went to Robert. This was unfortunate because, as he explained, he’d been driving since 6 p.m. the night before (it was currently 10:00 a.m.) and was trying to make enough money to cover his rent and other living expenses. One of these expenses, ironically, was paying to remove the custom muffler he’d had added to the vehicle (this before he began driving for Lyft) for extra vroom—a noise which seemed to get especially loud as he passed a truck on the highway in the righthand lane.
I’d noticed earlier that Robert had a Red Sox logo tattooed just below his right temple, and being a Massachusetts native, I felt obliged to obliged to ask him about it. Do you have a Boston connection? I asked, about halfway through the ride. I’m from there.
Robert told me no, the tattoo was a coverup. Gang banging, he explained. He told me how he’d used to sell drugs, but he’d put all that behind him now. He had a four-year-old daughter, who split time between Robert and his ex. He lived in Sacramento and came over to San Francisco three days a week because the money was better for drivers; he wanted to take his daughter on more outings in Sacramento—but usually when he got back from his marathon of driving, he was so exhausted it was all he could do to just sit around the house. His own mother often helped out with childcare, and they’d spend time together the three of them. But Robert’s daughter was very protective of him. She wanted her dad to herself.
I love my mom, said Robert, as if to defend her. She’s a great person.
He said that a couple times.
Had a Waymo been available at the time I called my ride, I would not have chosen to take a Lyft. This Lyft—provided by a man who’d been on the road for the past fourteen hours, in his retrofitted Chrysler—was no doubt significantly riskier, and in many ways less smooth, than a Waymo would have been. If someday I have children of my own old enough to hail a cab or Uber, I hope they opt instead for the safety of a robotaxi.
Still, one cannot help but wonder what is lost.
I wasn’t able to independently verify this Uber stat, but am taking it on faith from this interview (which, again, I recommend!)
Another friend described to me an incident where his Waymo got confused by fog when trying to turn off a busy-ish street. After a pause, it slowly (but safely!) reversed into a gap in traffic on the street it had come from.
My last Waymo ride was right before Halloween, and the screen displayed my car with a cartoony witch’s hat, with jack’o’lanterns lining the streets of the map:
Although regulators have authorized Waymo to operate on the highway, the company has refrained from doing so thus far. In fact, its cars are less likely to get into a crash in this environment (which has no pedestrians and more predictable driving conditions); but as with any vehicle, greater speeds mean that accidents—while rarer—are also more severe.