We spent two days riding Waymo's driverless taxis and it felt surprisingly normal
From the app to the riding experience, here’s our take on Waymo’s robotaxis, which are publicly available in the Phoenix, AZ, suburbs
Ryan Duffy
July 16, 2021 · 11 min read
morningbrew.com
excerpt:
Ryan: “Look at this, it’s like a bear hat.”
Rider Support (via intercom): *laughs*...“Oh, wow.”
Ryan: “Yeah, I don’t know what the person before me was doing with this.”
That exchange was the only small talk in my fifth taxi ride of the day. Save for the rubber bear hat/mask left behind by a previous rider, my 5.1-mile, 15-minute trip was uneventful. As a courtesy, I reported the lost item to the taxi company’s “rider support” team.
Other “drivers” in the taxi network were likely nearby, but they couldn’t have helped. And along with her coworkers, the Rider Support interlocutor was miles away. She appraised the lost-but-now-found bear mask through a passenger-facing fisheye camera, listened via in-vehicle mics, and responded through an intercom system.
If you haven’t caught on already, the driver wasn’t a person. It was Waymo “Driver”—a technological stack that’s been under development for 12 years.
Bearmaskgate was the most memorable of 10 robotaxi trips across 2.5 days in Chandler and Tempe, Arizona. Most rides were smooth and unremarkable, besides the glaring exception that no one was ever behind the steering wheel.
Where the wild Waymos areWaymo first opened Waymo One, its robotaxi service, to the general public in December 2018. But it didn't offer fully driverless rides to the public until last October. Today, its Arizona fleet—composed of Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans—is likely more than 300. Waymo One runs 24/7, providing hundreds of weekly rides across a 50-square-mile swath of suburban Phoenix (slightly larger than San Francisco). Waymo’s testing zone is double the ride-hailing area.
Besides one character you’ll meet later, few regular Waymo riders have publicly documented their experiences for the world to see.
With a plan to rectify that through email newsletters, the Brew touched down in Phoenix Sky Harbor in late June. My rules of engagement:
- Don’t prearrange rides with Waymo.
- Book directly through the public-facing app. Waymo One rides are fully autonomous and driverless.
- Red-team (i.e., test the limits of) the technology to the extent it’s safe to do so.
- Record and observe everything. Take copious notes.
- Bring a more discerning, skeptical lens to the experience than the newsletter writer who came before us.
There’s a (limited) app for that If you’re a US-based smartphone user, you can download Waymo’s app. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
The app’s core functionality—hiring robotaxis—only works in a “service area” that extends across parts of Chandler, Tempe, and Mesa, AZ. This, to my knowledge, is the only place in the US where robotaxis are actively picking up customers on public roads without a safety operator riding shotgun.
Post-download, users are greeted with a message from Waymo: “We’re fully autonomous in Metro Phoenix.” That’s a generous territorial interpretation, as coverage is limited to a small suburban part of the city. See for yourself:
Ryan/Waymo
The app’s first order of business is to check your location. You won’t be able to hail a ride from outside the Service Area’s hard geofence (i.e., virtual perimeter). So, to recap...
Step #1: Be inside the Service Area.
Step #2: Input destination.
Step #3: Select your pickup and drop-off locations.
Waymo has the Service Area’s major corridors, neighborhood drives, and shopping malls mapped to a T. Down to spots and rows in a parking lot, users can surgically select where they’d like to be picked up and dropped off. The precision is a double-edged sword, though, because the vans don’t just stop anywhere. They have strict marching orders to pull up only where it’s legal (as determined by the government) and safe (as decided by Waymo).
Negotiating drop-off and pickup is give-and-take. It’s really just take. Waymo does not give. An Uber, Lyft, or taxi driver may be willing to drop you off in a fire lane, but Waymo won’t. If your exact location isn’t available, you’ll have to accept a nearby spot and an additional walk.
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