• Waymo driverless cars are prowling the streets of major cities picking up fares. We took a ride, liked it, and would do it again. The experience feels largely same as an Uber.
• Our car was an all-electric, driverless Jaguar I-Pace.
• The Waymo uses lidar, radar, cameras and AI to navigate the streets, all safer than humans, on average.

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Riding around in the backseat of a Jaguar I-Pace through the streets of Santa Monica, California, most people who looked at all stared at the pile of radar/lidar/whatever-else-dar stacked on the roof—no one seemed to notice, or care, that this car HAD NOBODY DRIVING IT!!!

As my friend Mark (the other one) would say, “AIEEEEEEEE!”

This was the Waymo Driverless Car and you can summon one with your smartphone and tell it where to go. And, this is the best part, it will take you there! No more having to make small talk with a driver (“How about them Dodgers?” “Aw, they got no depth in the secondary…”). Now, with Waymo, you just get in the back seat, put on your seatbelt, and that’s it. The robot brains of the car handle everything else.

Waymo driverless taxis have been ferrying more riders around San Francisco and Phoenix for over a year now, and the creepy beasts are appearing in Santa Monica as we speak. Waymo offered me a code to get a free ride. The rides would have cost $7.09 for my 11-minute, 1.9-mile ride, and $6.86 for my other 11-minute, 1.8-mile ride. Since there’s no one to tip, you save money!

Waymo sprang out of the Google Self-Driving Car Project we rode around in back in 2015. That “car” was more like a wheeled gum drop and was limited to 25 mph on the roof of a Google parking structure.

This newest iteration of the robocar drove about as quickly and as cautiously as I would have driven. It even recognized and slowed for rain gutters.

On the first of my two drives, I was surprised by how quickly it accelerated from the curbside pickup place. I’d expected it to cautiously peek into traffic then cautiously and slowly accelerate into the street. But since it could “see” all the cars, pedestrians, bicyclists, and whatever else around it, it knew the coast was clear, and it moved out quickly and efficiently.

It also braked smoothly and evenly, better than most co-drivers I’ve ever shared a car with.

At one point, an ambulance approached from behind, and the Waymo pulled over to let it by.

The system—all that stuff piled atop the Jag and glued to the sides—includes cameras, lidar, radar, and a powerful AI computer platform.

“These sensors paint a complete picture of the world around the Waymo Driver in 360 degrees and in 3D up to three football fields away, even in the dark of night, in a range of conditions like rain,” Waymo says.

The passenger in the back seat can see what the Waymo brain sees, too, on a display tucked between the seats. The brain then uses machine learning to drive, “helping the Waymo Driver understand what’s around it (Perception) and calculating what might happen next (Prediction) to inform what the Waymo Driver will do next (Planner) as it navigates riders where they’re going without a human behind the wheel.”

Many people unfamiliar with all this stuff might be terrified. But, while I did feel a little weird at first, the Waymo Jag never made me feel it was unsafe or even inefficient. It got me from one end of Santa Monica to the other quickly and safely.

It felt much better than the typical radar cruise control car, for instance, which seems to pull out to pass, then wait three seconds before slowly accelerating while traffic piles up behind you. This one drove more or less like a responsible human, which is more than can be said for most traffic in Los Angeles.

A public records search done by Wired earlier this year found that while driverless cars have completed numerous trips without incident, “They have also proven to be a glitchy nuisance, snarling traffic and creeping into hazardous terrain such as construction zones and downed power lines. Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022—88 percent of them on streets with transit service, according to city transportation authorities, who collected the data from social media reports, 911 calls, and other sources, because companies aren’t required to report all the breakdowns.”

Waymo says it learns from each of those experiences and makes the cars better and safer each time.

It’s not just my anecdotal experience over two rides on a single afternoon. Waymo says it and Swiss Re, one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, published a study “aimed at developing new risk assessment methodologies, and found that there were 76% fewer property damage claims and 100% fewer bodily injury claims for every million rider-only miles driven with the Waymo Driver over the course of the study.”

Waymo also published a “one million mile safety research paper” earlier this year detailing data accumulated from over one million driverless miles. In that distance it says there were only two accidents that met NHTSA criteria to be called an accident, and 18 fender-benders, all of which it says were the fault of other drivers. One involved a car rear-ending the Waymo car when the driver was looking at his phone. Another incident involved a sign that fell over on the Waymo car. There were no incidents in intersections and no incidents that involved pedestrians, bicyclists, or construction workers, Waymo said.

The study not only suggests but seems to prove that a Waymo is safer than you or I. “Not me,” you say. “I’m an instructor for the Porsche Club!” But in between instructions and track sessions, when we are all on the road in miserable city traffic and tempted to look at our phones, we can get distracted. So many of us should be in Waymos.

Soon, a lot of us will be. Here’s how Waymo describes its presence in four cities now:

• Phoenix: Waymo is offering paid rider-only trips to members of the public across 225 square miles of The Valley, including Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport via the 24th or 44th Street PHX Sky Train Station.
• San Francisco: Waymo is serving paid rider-only trips to tens of thousands of San Franciscans across the city as we invite more riders in from our waitlist.
• Los Angeles: Residents and visitors in six neighborhoods across LA can experience free, fully autonomous Waymo One rides for a limited time.
• Austin: We’ll begin an initial phase of operations this fall, with fully autonomous deployment and our first rides with the public in the months following.

I was surprised by how smoothly my Waymo experience went. If you want to try it out, you can download the Waymo One app right now. You’ll be put on a waiting list and as they get more vehicles on more streets and can accommodate more riders, you will be able to ride.

The future is coming, don’t be afraid.

Have you ridden in a Waymo, or another autonomous car? Share your experience in the comments below.