Whoa, I’m in a Waymo

I gasped as the car navigated a hairpin turn and confronted new obstacles: a parked Amazon truck, a double-parked Toyota, and a woman pushing a stroller. To complicate matters, we were on such a steep San Francisco hill that I instinctively leaned forward in a misguided effort to keep the car from rolling backward.

“What will Waymo do?” I asked my husband.

“The system is trained to calculate situations like this. Relax.”

Waymo, in case you haven’t visited San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Phoenix lately, is Google’s fully self-driving robotaxi, and on a recent trip to San Francisco, we rode in one every day. To be clear, I’m more accustomed to robots than most people. My husband is a robotics engineer, and so is my son. I’m familiar with robots that do everything from climbing stairs in dog-shaped bodies to growing plants or loading boxes onto conveyor belts. Some have even become part of our family, like the little robot vacuum that committed Hari Kari when it swallowed one of my scarves in the closet.

Still, even for me, riding in a driverless car was a freaky experience. With Waymo, you use your phone to summon it the way you call an Uber or Lyft. When your sparkling white chariot arrives, it’s equipped with a swirly gadget on the roof and other protrusions. These are the lidar, cameras, and sensors that allow the car to “see” objects around it. You can see them, too, as a weird little video game playing out on screens inside the car. The pictures are fairly accurate: if a man is walking a dog on the sidewalk beside your Waymo, there’s a little cartoon man with a dog on a leash. Ditto with kids on skateboards and bikes.

There’s music, too. Entering a Waymo, you’re greeted by name, reminded to fasten your seatbelt, and then you hear space-age elevator music, enhancing that feeling of being caught in a Jetsons cartoon with flying cars. (Those, too, are coming soon.)

The Waymo, as my husband predicted, smoothly navigated the narrow channel between the two vehicles clogging the road and summited the hill with ease. Well done, Waymo.

After a few more rides, I trusted the vehicles not to lose their brakes on steep hills or hit anything, so it took me a while to realize why I still felt uneasy. Just to compare, we also called an Uber while we were in San Francisco. The driver was from Nigeria and we chatted as he drove. He told us about his three daughters: a lawyer, a nurse, and an engineer. “I miss my country, but it was worth coming to the U.S. to educate my girls,” he said.

For someone like my husband, who is fascinated by technology, Waymo was the transportation winner. For me, not so much.

Sure, Waymo cars are electric, and if people take Waymo, they don’t need to bring their cars into the city. The air is cleaner as a result. That’s great. But robotaxis also keep us separate from other people. Do we need to isolate ourselves even more than we do?

Think about it. Many of us no longer work in offices, thanks to remote work options. In the evenings, most of us aren’t out socializing, either, because we’re playing video games or streaming shows. (Okay, a few of us are still reading books.) Instead of walking, we ride around in our private cars or, increasingly, in robotaxis like Waymo. Even if we go to a bar or a diner, we’re apt to be on our phones instead of chatting up the strangers on either side of us. We like being in our safe bubbles.

Safe bubbles take the stress out of life. But the problem with being in a bubble is that you can’t feel the beat of a city. You might argue in favor of avoiding urban decay—I’ll admit that walking in downtown San Francisco can be a hellishly unpleasant experience at times-- but, if we avoid seeing the people around us, and I mean all of the people, we’re less inclined to get involved with the humans sharing this planet. It takes all kinds of people to make the world go around. We need to acknowledge, and embrace, this shared humanity if we’re going to work toward making the planet better for everyone.

For me, the best option in any city is still to walk its streets or take public transportation and chat with the people I meet who are willing to lift their heads from their phones. Barring that, I’ll choose a conversation with an Uber driver over a car that drives itself.