Pull over, Uber — robot taxis have arrived

The first thing to know about riding in a robot taxi is that it feels very, very weird.

The second thing to know is that, weirdly, riding in a robot taxi quickly starts to feel completely normal.

The idea of a car that drives itself is as old as science fiction. But the push for autonomous auto tech didn't get underway in earnest until about 20 years ago, when DARPA started running contests to see who could actually build a driverless vehicle. Two years ago, the Google spinoff Waymo and the GM subsidiary Cruise finally deployed cars without drivers in San Francisco.

It didn't go great. Just one day after Cruise started running its Uber-like ride-hailing service, a dozen of its cars coalesced into a swarm traffic jam. Last year, after getting hit by a human-driven car, a pedestrian fell to the street in front of a Cruise robot, which ran them over. Detecting a collision, the robot drove 20 feet forward and stopped at the curbside — dragging the person underneath.

Cruise got banned from the city. But today, Waymo's tricked-out Jaguar SUVs — fender-mounted lidar sensors spinning like medieval banners heralding the arrival of the king — are ubiquitous in San Francisco. Kids wave at them; tourists take pictures. At first, access was limited, by invitation only. But in July, the service opened to anyone willing to download an app and type in a credit-card number.

Even me.

I've been writing about cities and transportation for a long time, so I know that it's exceedingly rare for a new mode of transport to appear. Planes, trains, and automobiles — that's pretty much the history of the past two centuries of people getting from here to there in new ways. So I decided to spend a few weeks riding around in Waymo's cars, to see what our robot-driven future looks like. I used them for running errands, the same as I might rely on Uber or Lyft. I also spent a day gallivanting around town in a more touristy way, to see what longer and more challenging routes felt like. I've come away convinced that self-driving cars are going to alter some fundamental things about America's cities, and how we get around them — for better and for worse.

Before I hailed my first Waymo, I expected that riding in a robot cab was going to feel like a cozy version of the future. A car that drives itself? As a kid, I always knew that if I waited long enough, "Knight Rider" would come true. Turbo-boosted Super Pursuit Mode, here I come!

When you call a Waymo, the waiting part of the experience is certainly familiar. You request a ride, and the app tells you how far away the car is and when to expect it. When the robot pulls up, a sort of beacon on top illuminates with your initials. You unlock the car by touching the app, and the handles unfold from flush against the door, like guns on a Transformer. Waymo's head of UX design, Lauren Schwendimann, tells me the doors are activated by the phone talking directly to the car — a first bit of hand-holding in the new relationship between human and machine.

Get in, and the car greets you by name. Very chill ambient music plays, to get you in a Westworld frame of mind. Tap the touchscreen facing the back seat to tell the car you're ready, and off you go, with the screen providing a video-game-like view of the car's progress.

The whole idea is to make riders feel like everything is going to be OK. "We very much curate that to achieve this relaxed feel," Schwendimann says. "When you ride other forms of transportation, you're in other people's space. There's value to public transportation, but there is something about having space to yourself and that moment of quiet, privacy, and peace."

And, sure, it's calming — to a point. For me that point was when the car pulled away from the curb and I looked at the empty driver's seat. The steering wheel was turning of its own volition, as if I were being driven by a ghost. What I thought was, holy shit!

Before riding in my first Waymo, I hadn't considered that when people called the first automobile a "horseless carriage," it must have been out of abject horror. The thing moved like a carriage … but there's no horse! There's no horse! Spooky.

It turns out everyone who takes a Waymo experiences the same ghost-panic. "Yes, we know that is a very prominent feature of the ride experience," Schwendimann says. "It contributes to the sense of wonder and awe." That's mainly because robot cars, like every other vehicle on a city street, are required to have a functional steering wheel. In a Waymo, the driver's-side door doesn't even unlock. But once Waymo and other companies are permitted to roll out more Westworldly, podlike vehicles, without any driver controls, they'll be able to turn the space normally inhabited by a driver over to passengers. There won't be any "front seat." Younger siblings will weep, for there will no longer be a "shotgun!" to call.

Now, it's worth pausing to appreciate that hardly anyone on Earth has ever been alone in a moving automobile without being the driver. This is an entirely new sensation, and let me tell you, it's destabilizing. As the steering wheel rotates, the car's screens display your progress through the city's streets, re-rendered as some sort of phantom zone. Buildings appear as barely there outlines. Other cars are bluish apparitions, while pedestrians and cyclists glow a vibrant, flickering orange-red. The closest sensation I could think of is a "dark ride" at an amusement park, where everyone piles into an automated boat or a spaceship and gets pushed through an illuminated story populated by animatronic characters. You know Pirates of the Caribbean or It's a Small World? Waymo is Mr. Toad's Mild Ride.

The video display is intended to help keep the rider grounded, as it were. "What we show in the scene are things to help the rider orient to where they are and understand the basics of where the car is going to go next," Schwendimann says. But for me, the eerie screen view only added to the surreality. London cabbies used to get licensed based on their command of the Knowledge, a truly encyclopedic sense of how to get around London's thousand-year-old streets; neuroscientists found that drivers who acquired this mastery of spatial memory literally had bigger brains. Yet here I was, sitting inside a robot programmed with San Francisco Knowledge, and it made me feel like my brain was getting smaller as a result of the outsourcing. The screen displayed no street names; the buildings were unidentifiable apparitions. I couldn't even ask the driver to take a more scenic route, or to pull over while I grabbed some coffee. I felt oddly alienated from the city I was moving through.

From a consumer perspective, my Waymo experience was about on par with taking an Uber. Waymo was generally cheaper, and equally reliable. It sometimes took what seemed like slower, back-street routes. And it once canceled my pickup at a restaurant in North Beach just after a police car had rolled up nearby, sirens blaring and lights flashing, and brought traffic around me to a stop. But, flip side, the other day my Lyft driver, who seemed to have trouble following the directions on his phone, got lost. So … robot gets five stars?

But the weirdest part of taking a Waymo is how quickly it stops feeling weird. Once you've heard the onboarding spiel a couple of times, the whole thing starts to feel a little bit like, well, riding in a cab. And after the novelty of the empty driver's seat wears off, the temptation to just pull out your phone and doomscroll your way to the next destination is powerful.

Which is to say, it's shocking to be reminded of how quickly we begin to take the marvels of our world for granted. At one point, during my second ride, I reset the music from its futuristic ambient default setting to Classic EDM. But the next time I got into a Waymo, the futuristic ambient default was playing again. And I got mad! This self-driving, autonomous robot from the future can't even be bothered to remember my preference for Aphex Twin?

When I tell Schwendimann about this, she laughs at me, which I deserve. Then she assures me that they're working on all kinds of customization settings — music, interior lighting, whatever. Whichever car picks you up should feel like your car, she says. That's part of feeling safe.

Back in 2015, I rode in one of Google's experimental versions of a self-driving car, with a human backup sitting behind the wheel. The car drove like a 16-year-old who just got their learner's permit. Every stop sign, every pedestrian on a sidewalk, even the occasional tree would cause the robot to slam on the brakes hard enough to bounce my head off the headrest.

Waymo's Jags, by contrast, drive like a competent and cautious professional. Riding in them gets a little boring in part because they are uncannily good. We slipped deftly past a double-parked food-delivery driver — signaled, juked left, signaled, juked back right — amid Chinatown traffic. We changed lanes with confidence, maintained steady speeds on San Francisco's challenging hills. At one point, a driver with no patience for the Waymo's steady, speed-limit-abiding pace raced up behind us and pulled into a red-painted buses-only lane on our left to pass. The illegal move seemed to freak the Waymo out for a second — it paused, slowed way down. But then we got going again. (And yes, I realize it's weird to refer to myself and a robot car as "we.")

In my own life I drive a faster-than-you'd-expect little hatchback, and I'll admit that I sometimes drive faster than you'd expect. But in some circumstances the Waymos were actually more aggressive than I would've been. Last week I induced my kids to come robot-riding with me, bribed with the promise of a blowout back-to-school lunch at Swan Oyster Depot. We went ranging around town, including a long drive that put us on Portola Drive, a curving and hilly extension of the city's spinal main drag. The Waymo took those curves faster and more affirmatively than I would have. At least one driver even honked at us as we — well, I don't want to say "cut him off," because a robot would never. But the other guy leaned on his horn, which, when you think about it, is kind of hilarious. The war against the road machines begins with road rage.

Robots are clearly fantastic at doing car-like things. The question is, do we want more technology that does car-like things? Cars are flexible, fast, fun, and can go pretty much anywhere, as long as there's pavement and parking. So American cities basically gave them priority after World War II, ripping up trolley tracks and ramming new freeways through low-income and minority neighborhoods in the service of speed, suburban convenience, and petrochemical profits. But technological choices have consequences. The rise of cars fueled traffic jams, air pollution, climate change, income inequality, and a whole lot of death and misery from car crashes. Today about 20% of America's downtowns are devoted to parking — as many as 2 billion spaces.

Robot cars don't do much, if anything, to alleviate these problems — and they may make them worse. The biggest problem that robot cars "solve" is the cost of human labor. Instead of paying a living wage to cabbies, tech companies have spent billions of dollars developing robots to take their place. (Both Lyft and Uber have indicated that they envision their future as full of robot drivers.) The money goes up the line, to programmers, managers, and investors. Science has essentially discovered a way to increase profits by combining the social isolation and environmental degradation of the automobile with the frustration and ennui of public transit.

But really, the experience of sitting alone in a robot car is more than that. Will people use the opportunity to turn off the surveillance cameras and have sex? Probably: They used to do that on the gondola ride at Disneyland, too. But the fact is, women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ+ people encounter all sorts of harassment and outright violence as they move through cities. Ride hailing is particularly bad for that: Drivers harass lone passengers, and passengers harass drivers. Most of the conversation about the safety of robot cars has been about what happens when they hit someone, as they inevitably will. But the space inside a robot taxi is safe for people in a different way, because there's no one there to mess with you. It's one of the few ways to get around the urban landscape where you can be truly alone. If one metric for evaluating a city is how safely people and things can move through it, robot cabs will make cities measurably better.

So on the one hand, autonomous vehicles are a literal transport of delight, a miraculous and liberating technology. And on the other, they magnify all the scary economics, bad ethics, weird sociology, and redistribution of wealth that cars helped usher in almost exactly a century ago. Pluses and minuses! Philosophers call that a "technological sublime."

Since it's nearly impossible to imagine American cities building any grand new infrastructure — no protected bike lanes, no new trolleys or subway lines or high-speed rail — robot taxis are what we get. Robots, after all, don't jeopardize the twin North Stars of what passes for urban planning in America: free parking and the freedom to drive fast. Maybe that's why one of the biggest tech companies in the world is being allowed to field test 2-ton experimental robots on the streets of a major American city. Robot cars will never take up a parking space. They will never require us, horror of horrors, to take a bus or a train. Instead they will blend invisibly into the world we've already built. Just a ghost in a dysfunctional machine, taking us for a ride.

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.

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