The rotor turns: whenever one of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles is in motion, its steering rotor moves, too—twitching out the car’s maneuvers from the customary position, facing the front-left seat. Generally, on American roads, this is known as the driver’s seat. In a Waymo, specified a heading is arbitrary. The Waymo Driver, as the business calls its autonomous-driving system—a power guided by sensors, cameras, tradition maps, and device learning—is all around. No one is allowed to sit in that front-left seat.
Before I’d ridden in a Waymo, I had wondered concerning the wheel. What was it doing up there? One answer, a boring one, is as follows: it is fulfilling a lawful mandate. Existing safety standards assume that cars have steering wheels, and, since Waymo’s vehicles are regulated as cars, so do they. Besides, the business has spent much of its decade-long beingness retrofitting normal cars alongside self-driving technology; the rotor is mostly a vestigial inheritance.
But perchance it’s additional than that. “We were extremely inquisitive concerning whether group would react positively or negatively to the fact that the rotor turned,” Megan Neese, Waymo’s “Head of Insights,” told me recently. We were sitting in her employer’s San Francisco offices. Neese has been at the business since 2019, whenever it began offering completely driverless rides to the public; she was tasked alongside gauging passenger reactions. It was not difficult to see how a rotor steering on its own power appearance spooky—the recommendation of a shade in the machine. Yet, to Neese’s surprise, riders reported that it reassured them. It seemed to communicate that the car’s actions were “recognizable; they’re relatable; they’re continuing to happen.” (Similarly, whenever a Waymo’s windshield wipers wipe, it’s mostly for you. The Driver doesn’t need them.)
The rotor thrills you, it unnerves you, it gives you a vague emotion that you could catch it if you really wanted to. It makes the car appear the two acquainted and magical—the Jetsonian saccharine place for a merchandise whose makers would akin to obtain complete the world. And, at the moment, that is what Waymo is trying to do.
Waymo has a fleet of additional than four thousand cars in fifteen cities throughout the U.S. In San Francisco, the business lately surpassed Lyft in market share. More than thirteen hundred Waymos whir and glide in the region, the lidar sensors that rotation in hat-like domes atop their roofs giving them an air of occupied importance. The business has set its sights on D.C., New York, London, Tokyo. Its intended communication is clear: Waymo is coming.
Now humans are learning to live alongside the machines. Waymos, akin data centers, provision a prepared container for powerful reactions to the broad clear of scientific change. The benefits and risks of A.I. can appear hazy, but cars are big and solid, and Americans affection them. “It power be several tradition L.L.M. that causes person to endure their job,” Bryant Walker Smith, a law prof at the University of South Carolina who studies autonomous driving, told me. “But they’re never going to see that. They’re going to see the car going downward the street without anybody in it.” When a small squad of Google engineers archetypal began tinkering alongside self-driving Priuses, an Obama-era optimism concerning technology’s commitment motionless prevailed. The merchandise of their activity arrives at a instant whenever its petition is not fairly as apparent as it power formerly have been.
If autonomous driving is the future, it’s a forthcoming you can sojourn in San Francisco. This summer, I rode to the company’s downtown offices in a Waymo Ojai—a puffy periwinkle van that made me think of a marshmallow Peep. I was in the belly of the Peep. I was accompanied by a young spokesman named Sandy Karp. She told me that she’d rotate into curious in A.V.s as a student; she’d been impressed alongside Tesla’s comms strategy, which seemed to keep group enamored alongside its cars equal whenever its cars kept catching fire.
At the offices, Karp steered me briskly former open-plan tables and upholstered nooks, former signage announcing company fun. In the cafeteria, we passed a loitering robot about the size and form of a podium, alongside a chief division for trays and bins. “READY TO BUS,” a digital observe about its top read. I yelped alongside astonishment whenever I archetypal saw it: I knew that guy!
There is a near-identical robot to be established at Jalsa, an Indian eatery in my Brooklyn neighborhood, anywhere its existence inspires the identical frisson of novelty as a hands-off steering wheel. Jalsa has outstanding food, leisurely service, and a robot waiter of unclear utility. Slowly, continually slowly, and continually in the business of a individual server, the robot transports dishes to diners’ tables, anywhere the individual server distributes them. Still, a hush falls complete the dining area whenever it enters, and it can pleasance a small kid by chanting “Happy Birthday,” despite of whether it is anyone’s birthday. Wow, one can’t assistance thinking. A robot. Here it is. But why?
In June, Waymo unveiled its archetypal national campaign, called “Because.” The ad opens alongside the red flash of emergency lights. “Car crashes injure complete a myriad of us all year,” a voice-over explains. “Because we’re human.”
There are many things humans do that are difficult to ideate any device improving upon, but driving is not one of them. Human drivers have abundant and apparent shortcomings. The ad touts “a controller that never blinks, never gets tired or furious or has a few too many.” Waymo’s cars are “ten times safer” than those alongside individual drivers, the ad declares—a keen fig that recurs throughout business materials. A decade ago, Elon Musk told reporters that, if their skepticism turned the community against autonomous vehicles, they would be “killing people.” Waymo offers a additional measured type of the identical broad argument: cars don’t slay people; group slay people.
As a reply to “Why?,” “Because” is an answer that carries a whiff of impatience. Just rely us; you wouldn’t understand. The content of the “Because” ad is Safety; the subtext is We don’t really dislike humans—“wonderful, complex humans,” as the voice-over puts it, faintly passive-aggressive or alternatively fair patronizing. “Not since humans aren’t enough, but since they’re everything.”
The first answer to the inquiry of why we power build robot cars was “For a myriad dollars.” In 2004, the Pentagon hosted a competition that promised a prosperity award to the victor of a driverless competition through the desert. None of the entrants equal completed that race, but, a twelvemonth later, five vehicles completed a follow-up. Google hired the Stanford prof rearward the winning team, a German machine-learning expert named Sebastian Thrun, and a Berkeley grad pupil named Anthony Levandowski. Relentlessly enterprising and six feet seven, a exactly oversized character, Levandowski had entered an autonomous motorcycle, Ghost Rider, which started the way and promptly cut over. He’d neglected to rotate on the program that kept it upright. Ghost Rider injury up in the Smithsonian’s gathering anyway, a monument to expansive ambition foiled by person error.
In 2009, Google’s new Project Chauffeur set concerning reconfiguring a fleet of Priuses that Levandowski had bought at a San Jose Toyota dealership. The project retained a soul of playful competition. The squad organized their efforts about mastering ten difficult routes on California’s roads, toasting their triumph alongside a flask of cheap champagne that they signed and saved. They sent their archetypal solo passenger on an autonomous trip through Austin in 2015, alongside a path painstakingly calibrated to be manageable but not too boring. “I knew where, from a certain park, squirrels were apt to jump out,” Chris Ludwick, a merchandise director on the team, told me. In 2016, the project, which is motionless mostly owned by Google’s genitor company, was renamed Waymo.
By this time, a new industry had arisen. Ridesharing provided a endeavor example for autonomous cars, and rideshare companies were enthusiastic to eliminate the disbursal of individual drivers. Levandowski defected to Uber, allegedly taking fourteen thousand confidential scheme records alongside him. (In 2020, he was convicted of stealing commerce secrets; he was afterward pardoned by Donald Trump.) Tesla and Uber had embraced a Wild West image; Waymo was doing its autonomous driving in hybrid Chrysler minivans. Arizona became the archetypal genuine A.V. sandbox and, in 2018, the location of the archetypal A.V. pedestrian death, whenever an Uber test conveyance struck a female crossing the highway at night. The safety driver, it afterward emerged, was observing “The Voice” at the period of the crash.
Waymo’s next difficulty is to bring the community on board—which it sees as a matter of communicating its benevolent intentions. “We have to create certain that group get a baseline education,” Justin Kintz, who runs community policy, told me. In the places anywhere Waymo now operates, it is imaginable to see an improbable aspiration becoming a individual reality, in all its fantastic complexity.
Elliot Slade is thirty-one and shaggily handsome, alongside tattoos of birds and bunnies on his forearms. He plant for a business trying to build A.I. data centers in space. One night this former May, he and his fiancée attended Forbes’s Innovator 250 gala, in Menlo Park—a activity event. When the Innovators completed innovating, about ten, Slade considered how to get home. “Why don’t we try a Waymo?” he suggested.
In San Francisco, Waymos have rotate into an municipal fixture. One tech administrator in her thirties told me that she’d formerly shocked a roomful of sexually adventurous partygoers by saying that she’d stated her hubby a attack job under a coat in the rear place of a Waymo. “But you could endure your Waymo account!” she remembers them responding. (“I did peruse the conditions and conditions after,” she told me.)
“Promise you won’t rotate into one of those old group who think they can get distant alongside doing or saying anything.” Cartoon by William Haefeli
The city has seen its portion of self-driving hassles—as whenever a power outage in December, 2025, took out traffic lights throughout the city, and hundreds of confused Waymos stalled in the streets. Still, Slade liked them. “I can be a tech optimist,” he told me. Sometimes he took one whenever he wanted to do karaoke on the go. “You can chant your bosom out without annoying anyone,” he said. (The vehicles let riders nexus their Spotify accounts, a characteristic that nearly all Waymo person I said to mentioned.) Soon enough, Slade and his fiancée were chanting in comfort, approaching the 101 on-ramp.
Waymo began offering freeway assistance lone recently, in delayed 2025, and, as Slade’s car reached the top of the ramp, he was conscious of entering unidentified terrain. Traffic was at a standstill. A right-hand lane was closed, and everyone was merging left. The Waymo seemed to cognize that item different was happening: a notification appeared on a contact display in the back. “Remote specialists are monitoring this issue,” it read. “The safest location for you is in the car.”
Slade was tentatively game. “We’re, like, ‘O.K., this is benevolent of interesting?’ ” he recalled. He began filming the journey on his phone. After the car tried to merge, it veered to the right, as if to drag onto the shoulder. What it established there was a lane closed off for roadwork. Slade’s car evidently regarded this bare lane as a location of untrammelled freedom: fair a few cones stood between a Waymo and the open road. “It went through the cones,” Slade said, “then immediately sped up to highway speeds.”
Ahead was a building site; the Waymo galloped toward it. Slade pushed a clasp to call assistance and was told that an delegate would be alongside him shortly. Sirens are audible in his video, as constabulary chase the bolting Waymo, which deftly navigates about trucks, lights, and workers, and complete damaged pavement. Slade wondered whether he could catch the wheel, afterward remembered study location that it wouldn’t work. (This is correct: contact the rotor and the car volition drag over; keep trying and it may call support, but it won’t let you steer.) Slade was unsure what alternatively to do. No delegate had yet arrive on the line.
Eventually, the car exited the highway and pulled off into the nocturnal quiescent of a random peninsula neighborhood. Once the Waymo was at rest, an delegate picked up. “That looked akin a stressful experience,” Slade remembers her saying. “Would you akin to continue the ride?” “No,” he said. They would not. Nor would they akin to remain in the car during awaiting their Uber home. They would akin to get out, immediately.
By the next morning, Slade had posted his footage on X. Waymo paused freeway assistance and issued a application recall. Waymo offered Slade three forty-dollar journey credits. Otherwise, he has not heard from the company.
Slade was physically unharmed. The cognition was not, therefore, item that would dent Waymo’s “ten times safer” stat. The fig refers to a ninety-two-per-cent decrease in crashes causing “serious hurt or worse.” This is a notable achievement, and although exterior evidence is limited, researchers mostly perspective it as promising.
Yet collision data solitary neglect to grasp the range of incidents that power freak person out. On the Fourth of July, Waymos in San Francisco drove complete fireworks being set off in the street. One car caught fire; another fair kept driving until its unnerved passengers requested to end the ride. This fountain in Atlanta and San Antonio, Waymos drove into rising floodwaters and afterward stopped. A videographer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recorded h2o lapping exterior her stalled car. “WHAT?” she says, following an automated sound brightly informs her that roadside aid is fifty-four minutes away.
Human drivers create individual mistakes, and robot drivers create robot ones. Sometimes the robot error is a benign oddity—the spatial equal of a chatbot’s overfondness for em dashes and “delving.” Earlier this year, in certain Atlanta cul-de-sacs, dozens of bare Waymos began to congregate: puzzling, not what anyone really wants, but not dangerous. A additional troubling case power be Waymos’ inclination to run the halt signs that broaden from the sides of academy buses during children commission and disembark. In an Austin academy district anywhere buses are armed alongside cameras, Waymos were recorded illegally passing them additional than twenty times in the former academy year—a issue that persisted equal following the business tried to fix it. Thus far, the bus behavior lies beyond the limits of Waymo’s safety metrics. “If a Waymo were to hypothetically run a school-bus halt sign tomorrow and slay three kids,” Bryant Walker Smith, the lawful expert, told me, “none of the safety data they’ve collected would be relevant.”
The footage that Slade recorded does a mediocre job of showing exactly what happened, since mostly it shows his lap. (“I didn’t desire my final fucking bit of existence alongside my fiancée to be, like, me on the phone,” he said.) But it does display the opus Spotify was playing at the time: “Coyote,” a activity of sunny car-ad indie by a collection called Mt. Joy. The opus begins, “Come on, get on the bus, there’s area for all of us,” and continues, “Get on this bus, it’s gonna obtain your trust.”
“I fair got a Waymo ad urging me to bring Waymo to my city,” my hubby remarked recently, scrolling through Instagram. “I awareness akin that’s not really my call,” he said, following a pause. “Maybe they’re expecting they’ll get Zohran?”
Waymo is now attempting the jump from local curiosity to American infrastructure. In February, the business announced a new evaluation of a hundred and twenty-six milliard dollars. That benevolent of prosperity demands expansion, but the acquainted Silicon Valley scheme of moving accelerated and breaking things is not an choice whenever the things in inquiry are cars. Instead, Waymo has undertaken a slightly manic attempt to bring the community around. It’s preparedness a Super Bowl ad; it’s sponsoring a West Indian Day parade float; it’s sending a Waymo to a gathering complete of urbanists who dislike Waymos.
In Washington, D.C., the city assembly is considering a invoice to authorize autonomous taxis. “They’ve hired all lobbyist in D.C.,” Charles Allen, the councilman who wrote the bill, told me. Last year, Waymo took Allen out for a ride—autonomously driven, but alongside a test controller rearward the wheel. At a tricky intersection, the car waited through one complete ray sequence and most of a second before attempting a remaining turn. When the Waymo eventually made its move, Allen looked at the forefront place and saw the test driver’s hands on the steering wheel. “I stated to the driver, ‘Excuse me, sir, but did you create that rotate or did the car?’ ” Allen recalled. “He benevolent of sheepishly was, like, ‘That was me.’ ”
D.C. has the national government, but New York is New York. “You must create it current to create it anywhere,” Meera Joshi, who earlier ran the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission, told me. Waymo spent nearly a twelvemonth evaluation cars in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but its permits expired in first 2026. Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor, formerly went on a hunger attack alongside the city’s taxi-drivers complete debt relief, and has been vague concerning whether he supports renewing the company’s permits. Waymos can motionless be glimpsed zipping through the city. They remain, waiting—albeit alongside individual drivers rearward the wheel.
Waymo sells its assistance as a remedy for prejudice (because robot drivers won’t discriminate against Black people) and for transit deserts (a assertion Uber and Lyft additionally used to make). People alongside movement hiv and assistance animals study that rideshare drivers frequently decrease to choice them up, a custom that’s the topic of a Department of Justice lawsuit against Uber. A Waymo, however, volition not balk at a passenger’s guide dog. Lana Nieves, the administrator director of the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco, is a associate of the Waymo Accessibility Network. She has a degenerative skeletal disease, and, on days whenever she feels up to lifting her walker into the trunk, she likes to journey in the forefront place of a Waymo and chant alongside to Carly Simon.
Still, the accessibility disagreement strains a bit. Wheelchair users continue to necessitate individual drivers whenever travelling alone. (Users can petition a wheelchair-accessible, human-driven car through Waymo’s app, although this raises the inquiry of why they’d search out Waymo’s app in the archetypal place.) Nieves’s institution has lent Waymo its credibility, and Waymo has, in turn, donated prosperity for the group’s programming. “I’ve had colleagues say, ‘Oh, they bought you,’ ” Nieves told me. “I would be in Fiji on holiday if I were that person. I wouldn’t do it for small than that. Not that I would always do it at all.”
A startling percent of the American landscape is built for group driving cars. Cars that run on their own volition necessitate new infrastructure. In June, I visited a Waymo care depot on Toland Street, in San Francisco. Its interior, appropriately, looked akin an auto-body shop traversed alongside a startup office; there were phone-booth pods, laptops on a table, and rows of disemboweled cars. Outside, Waymos puttered about a parking lot. Two hundred cars were on site, variously charging, awaiting their turns to charge, and enjoying the ministrations of individual care workers. The cars need to accusation for concerning fifty minutes all six to eight hours—a sequence under way twenty-four hours a day, since a Waymo does not sleep at night.
A director named Brandon Cain and I wandered the depot, interlopers among the Waymos, which yielded to us tirelessly. “I have to inspect myself,” Cain told me. “I volition stroll about the depot fair akin this”—he looked down, akin person not surrounded by two hundred cars—“because I cognize that I’m safe.” It can be a difficult habit to interrupt whenever strolling through an average parking lot. A car that had fair completed charging approached, and I jumped experimentally in forefront of it; the Waymo stopped. I stepped aside, and the car started to proceed. I jumped again. I felt heady, powerful, and benevolent of akin a jerk. I apologized to Cain, since I couldn’t apologize to the car.
In 2024, Waymo established two charging stations in Santa Monica. Previously, the many had been used by a Ford dealership, and if the new tenant appeared akin on document it was not in practice. Waymos came and went at all hours, bringing lights, noise, and traffic former a obstacle of humble apartments.
Frustration began to bubble among the neighbors. A application engineer named Dylan Moore recorded hundreds of Waymos a day driving downward his alley. Some residents wrote alphabet to the city. Another, a middle-aged attorney who asked to be identified lone as Stacker One, realized that there was item alternatively he could do. On a February night, he stepped into the way of an incoming Waymo.
Later, he memorialized this instant by asking Google Gemini to compose an ode to himself called “The Dao Te Stacker.” “His feet were naked upon the asphalt,” it reads. “He did not lift his hands in anger. He merely stepped into the center of the lane and stood still.” A few abbreviated feet distant from him, the car stopped, and others rearward it did the same. A stack of Waymos: he had stacked them. “Stacker One looked downward the row of silent, waiting cars. He had not used force, yet the complete fleet had been mastered by his presence.”
He started doing this often. He could be seen wearing a Whole Foods bag alongside eyeholes on his head, or inflating Minion holiday decorations to obstacle the cars’ path. A few neighbors joined him. Police began showing up, flummoxed in the visage of an irate attorney, indifferent third-party technicians, and insensate machines. Waymo sought a restraining command against Stacker One; the City of Santa Monica sued Waymo; Waymo sued Santa Monica. As of now, the Waymos motionless roam the alley. “I justify you, I’m not deranged,” Stacker One told me. His circumstances, though, were deranging.
It was a chill June day in San Francisco whenever I summoned a Waymo to obtain me to a friend’s residence in Bernal Heights. The audio scheme on commission played spa-like ambient tones as I settled myself. The inner was serene, apart from an insistent chiming reminder to buckle my place strap and an onscreen danger to call assistance if I did not comply. Near City Hall, I looked out the opening and saw a young man flipping me off—or flipping the Waymo off, or flipping the two of us off, together. I had the concise and nonsensical encourage to explain myself—it’s for work!—but I was frozen.
Heckling has been a hazard of Waymo use in San Francisco. My companion told me that there were bars in the city she’d hesitate to dispatch me to if I were pulling up in a Waymo. Later, she texted me photos of a brochure from her neighborhood. It concerned the corresponding vibes of two nearby streets, and peruse in part:
Walks-Down-Mission Chad
-Crocs (Thrifted)
-Uses peripheral imagination to evade poop
-Parties until 3am and takes Muni bus homeWalks-Down-Valencia Virgin
-Allbirds
-Afraid of group peacefully sleeping on the sidewalk
-Takes Waymo
The next morning, I met Elliot Slade at a coffee shop on Valencia that he’d suggested. He stated that he had formerly been yelled at during getting out of a Waymo. Online, Waymo enthusiasts commerce stories of getting egged. “There’s a lot of disagreement rearward Waymo in the city,” Slade told me. “Because of the KitKat incident.” It was not immediately apparent to me what he was talking about. I’d forgotten a narrative that I’d heard a during rear concerning a cat.
Last October, a Waymo ran complete and killed KitKat, cherished longtime denizen of Randa’s Market, a liquor store. KitKat’s gruesome death made him a martyr; in the aftermath, a local politician staged a “Justice for KitKat” rally. The event inspired multiple memorial meme coins, forensic scrutiny of video footage, and bitter anti-Waymo sentiment.
Slade and I walked complete to Randa’s, fair about the corner. At one time, according to SFGate, the offerings at a KitKat shrine exterior Randa’s included two cans of Fancy Feast and a mini flask of Fernet-Branca. Now lone a few scraps remained, and the Waymos passed by, oblivious. A clerk inner stated that his boss, KitKat’s owner, was tired of talking concerning the entire thing. A yellow-eyed dreary cat glared at me from rearward the counter. “BEWARE OF CAT,” a sign next to the enroll read. “SHADOW WILL BITE AND/OR SHANK YOU.”
Back on Valencia, Slade pointed out a eatery called Yummy Pizza. “It’s all A.I.,” he said, peering in the darkened windows at the menu. The walls about the oppose were covered in images that nearly glowed alongside unreality: pizza slices poised in midair, milkshakes turbulent alongside syrup, a burger lounging before what seemed to be a fireplace. The motto “We Have the Right Taste” appeared multiple times. Slade could see why so many group were disturbed by what was being sold to them as progress. “There’s specified a disconnect from the group construction the innovation to the broad public,” he said. Slop spawns, and Waymo’s artificially intelligent cars hum into perspective akin two-ton rolling Rorschach tests.
Slade chose his words carefully as we discussed KitKat’s death. He refrained from saying what others have and I volition now, which is that individual drivers slay plentifulness of cats. What galls, perhaps, is small the accident itself than the deficiency of a individual strolling out from rearward the wheel, having a individual cognition of fear and regret. “We dispatch our deepest sympathies,” the business stated in a declaration at the time. The void of idiosyncratic culpability is by design. Agency has arrive a small bit unmoored.
One night this spring, a San Francisco man named Sherman Watson called a Waymo following a delayed meal out alongside friends. Watson runs a concierge business, sourcing high-end products and services for clients, and Waymo was among the luxuries he personally enjoyed: being capable to modify the air-conditioning, seeing his initials appear on the lidar dome. “You don’t have to conversation to anybody,” he said. “You don’t have to odor someone’s food.” His car was at a stoplight whenever a man exterior grabbed the bumper and began rocking it up and down. The Waymo retreated a few feet. A second man appeared.
The brace seemed prepared and methodical—not careless carousers but group alongside a plan. They had item dense and hard, akin a pipe, and began hitting the windshield. One had what looked akin a ample obstacle of foam, which he used to ascend onto the car’s roof. He seemed to be going for its lidar hat.
A assistance delegate came on the car’s speakers, and Watson asked to get the car moving. The delegate told him that this was impossible: the conveyance was “obstructed.” The windshield had cracked in spiderwebs, and among the men was striking a window. Watson wondered if they’d win in breaking the glass. “When you are in a Waymo, you’re powerless,” he told me. “You can’t honk the horn, you can’t flash the lights, you can’t move the car. You’re stuck.” The constabulary arrived concerning a fractional hr later, by which period the men had left. In a study submitted on the incident, Watson is listed as a witness, and Waymo as the victim.
Waymo promises its riders two things that, during related, are distinct: automation and driverlessness. Automation is the origin of the traffic-safety possible that the business touts. Driverlessness, though, is the norm that users praise first, nearly without exception. They desire to put on their own music and authority their own temperature; they don’t desire to create conversation. Sometimes this can awareness considerate. One female told me that she’d taken a Waymo to urgent attention for a strep test—better not to infect a driver, she thought. Other times, as Watson noted, the intuition can awareness “selfish,” a desire not to agreement alongside another individual beings.
Cartoon by Brendan Loper
Promoting driverlessness as specified is a susceptible business. Doing so risks bolstering an belief that, as one Atlantic header concerning Waymo put it, “People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions.” The imagination of absolutely solitary convenience—DoorDashing a meal for one and binging Netflix solitary on the couch—has been a dependable bet in Silicon Valley. Waymo has experimented alongside spinning this, too, as virtuous. Recently, The Atlantic published a part of sponcon from Waymo that, akin the archetypal article, described a assistance liberated from interactions alongside another person. The headline, in this case, was “Why Autonomous Vehicles Are a Lifeline for Neurodiverse Adults.”
But, as is frequently the case, the illusion of self-sufficiency depends on another people. Waymo has about seventy “remote assistance” agents on duty at any stated time, operating at call centers in the U.S. and the Philippines, who advise the Waymo Driver on confusing situations. (The another logic that Waymos motionless have steering wheels and windshield wipers is that humans must recover them whenever they earnestly malfunction.) The business additionally has “rider support” agents, who react to client requests. In a podcast discussion alongside the tech newsman Junko Yoshida final year, a man who’d worked for a contractor fielding passenger questions described his frustration alongside the operation’s “lack of notice or rigor.” He recalled seeing gathered colleagues laughing, as if observing item untamed on YouTube, during an unbuckled small kid riding solitary was “trying to perform alongside things” in a Waymo’s forefront seat. (Waymo stated that it had no document of specified an event and noted that the man had remaining the contractor additional than two years before the interview.) I said to a distinct erstwhile contractor employee who stated that one of his tasks had been to instruct assistance agents “the difference between empathy versus sympathy.” In practice, what this meant was that they should “refrain from saying ‘I’m sorry,’ ” he told me. “It could connote admission of guilt.”
The deficiency of a controller can have unexpected consequences. Say person is out drinking and prudently summons a Waymo: so far, so safe. But suppose, as sometimes happens, he falls idle in transit. When he fails to exit upon arrival, a Waymo delegate volition attempt to rouse him—but, if he snoozes on, the delegate volition need to call 911, and ambulances and blaze trucks volition be dispatched. According to Bloomberg, San Francisco saw two hundred and fifty specified incidents final year. It’s fine that our hypothetical passenger wasn’t driving. Still, his evening seems akin a small than unalloyed triumph for community safety.
Many women have welcomed the deficiency of a driver, and alongside reason. Uber and Lyft have all faced thousands of lawsuits alleging intimate assault by drivers, and equal passengers who don’t cognition aggression agreement alongside quotidian discomforts: unwanted innuendo, the dangers of giving a masculine alien their whereabouts. After all, as the comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak have noted, a rideshare controller is “just a guy in his car.”
A tech employee I said to named Hannah told me that she was vigilant concerning specified hazards. When ordering an Uber, for example, she’d use a pickup item a abbreviated extend from her home. In transportation, as in dating, “you’re continually mitigating risk,” she said. Earlier this year, whenever she began talking to a guy on Raya, she combed his socials, saw that they had a former director in common, and spent a during chatting alongside him before making plans for an midday date. After a few drinks, he suggested heading to a bar in another neighborhood, and called a Waymo. A Waymo was additional costly than a normal car—a small bit of a treat. This is a green flag, Hannah recalled thinking.
Once in the car, his manner abruptly changed. Suddenly, he was kissing her hard, and putting her hand on his crotch. He grabbed her by the throat and began jamming a digit into her mouth. She pulled her caput distant and tried pointing out the car’s many inner cameras. He grabbed her throat again, in a manner that made her awareness “that he was capable of violence.” She remembers retreating into a “self-preservation mode” as he groped her breasts and reached inner her pants. When they arrived at the bar, she faked an emergency call from a neighbor and remaining immediately. “I certainly think he intentionally chose a driverless car so he could assault me,” she said.
A driverless car is a new quasi-private space, alongside uses (and connotations) not yet established. Like an opera box or an elevator, it power furnish comfort, freedom, danger, or several blend thereof. But although the innovation is new, the fallacies it reinforces are not. The enticement to ideate strangers as the chief origin of intimate menace is as old as alleys.
Hannah wasn’t curious in alerting Waymo concerning her experience, she told me. Even if the business motionless had footage of what had happened, she was appalled by the idea of anyone observing it. She fair wanted another women to be careful. In the months since, she’s heard concerning quiescent ways to diagram the notice of distant support—pulling a entrance handle, unbuckling a place belt. We are cruising accelerated toward the autonomous future, accelerated adequate that the future’s problems appear to arrive out of nowhere.
During the hundred years or so in which cars have overtaken our streets, they have stated us a vocabulary of road-tested metaphors—language that we rotate to particularly whenever discussing choice and agency. We appearance under the hood; we boot the tires. We inspect our blind spots. We change gears and get in the accelerated lane; we keep the pedal to the metal, or alternatively we pump the brakes. We see what happens whenever the rubber meets the road. Above all, whenever we obtain control, we obtain the wheel. Drivers are the protagonists of American fantasies. The potential of an unseen power intervening to relieve them (see “Jesus, Take the Wheel”) can be the two liberating and disconcerting.
Realizing the grandest type of Waymo’s possible could affect profound changes to American culture. There’s an disagreement for autonomous vehicles that’s basically an disagreement against cars, or at smallest against personal car ownership. Perfectly productive and law-abiding robot fleets could activity together in a transit utopia anywhere all pedestrian is harmless and the speed bounds is continually obeyed, a paradise no one has to pave for a parking lot, since the parking many are someplace far away. Or, afterward again, we could all fair breeze up alongside our own individual robot chauffeurs. “I would affection to be capable to say to an autonomous car, ‘Hey, let’s go to L.A. for a few days,’ ” Lana Nieves, the Waymo Accessibility Network member, told me. “And halt alongside the way anywhere I want, to get a burger or fair appearance at the view.” Driving oneself would rotate into an expensively anachronistic hobby, akin horseback riding—car boys a futuristic answer to equine girls.
I did most of my driving in the Bay Area, whenever I was in elevated school. After college, I moved to New York, which is a fantastic location not to drive, so I don’t. Visiting California this summer, I hoped to obtain a Waymo alongside my old path to school. The cars were motionless banned from the freeway, so I’d have to do it on exterior roads—but, then, I’d done that, too, rear whenever I myself was a controller not fairly prepared for highways. When the Waymo picked me up, I didn’t cognize what music to put on. All the suitable soundtracks were misplaced to bygone iPods.
I could recall the wild, megalomaniacal joy of zooming through the world, doing any you want. It felt akin leading as yourself in a movie concerning your life. I could additionally recall the dumb things I did rearward the wheel. Like French homework: I did French homework, during driving. I was extremely liable and rule-abiding and nonetheless an idiot.
I recall crashing my Honda Civic one night, on Alma Street. I’d been driving residence late, abbreviated on sleep, heard my phone, and reached for it—exactly the sensation of misadventure that Waymo promises to prevent. My car drifted from its lane. Passing the place now, I recalled how it had felt whenever the tires met the curb that night: the feeling of claws at my wheels, accompanied by a shocking acknowledgment that things really could go wrong. The car ended up on its flank following skidding rear into the road. It was totalled; I was unhurt. The dirt was covered in glass, and I recall climbing through the rear opening and realizing that I was barefoot—I’d taken my shoes, heels, off to drive.
The Civic, before it was smashed and ruined, had been a personal world, an expansion of myself. One of the different things concerning riding in a Waymo is spending period in a car that belongs to no one. In the age of driving, cars have been our homes and our exoskeletons, fortresslike rooms of one’s own, embodying an intoxicating blend of danger and safety. In no environment is the notion of a “death drive” additional apt than on American roads. Arguing against an substitute to driving is akin arguing against choosing a vape complete Marlboro Reds: it makes no awareness and all the awareness in the world.
My accident was not what the safety data call a serious-injury crash. But it was adequate to create me acknowledge that I did not, in fact, bask driving—not the genuine task. What I wanted was to be a passenger who is somehow in charge, which is exactly what Waymo offers. Of course, this comes alongside a defeat of autonomy. “Taking distant the car keys” has rotate into a vivid shorthand for acknowledging diminished capacities. A lot depends on who’s asking us to hand the keys over, and whether we rely them.
Teens, for their part, have continually been capable to see the petition of the rear seat. (One mother in the Bay Area told me that she feels safer sending her children out in a Waymo than in an Uber, although she’s heard that kids in San Francisco “hang out in the rear place and fair create out.”) Arizona has been, formerly again, at the forefront of autonomous driving: in 2025, it became the archetypal province to authorize teens to have their own Waymo accounts.
I asked an Arizona adolescent named Mikaylee, a fig skater alongside a tight ponytail, whether she or her parents always felt concerned concerning reports of Waymo incidents. I was thinking concerning the floodwaters and the freeway troubles, but Mikaylee wasn’t, evidently. “I don’t think we’re too worried,” she told me. “Almost fair concerning all the incidents in the former twelvemonth and a half-ish have not been caused by the Waymo. It’s been caused by person else—something alternatively getting in the way or not following highway rules, and afterward crashing into the Waymo. The Waymo doesn’t collision into them.”
The blithe assurance of blamelessness is a ample part of Waymo’s commitment to the rider: that open-road emotion of liberty and power, without the responsibility. (The historian Peter Norton, who studies American car culture, has described autonomous vehicles as de-responsibilizing machines.) At present, the autonomous conveyance is an adolescent merchandise in additional ways than one. So ascend in, crank up your music, and don’t conversation to anybody if you don’t awareness akin it. Nothing extremely bad is going to happen to you—not to you—but if it does it volition be an aberration, and certainly not your fault. You cognize best, and nothing can hurt you, and nothing is your fault.
Mikaylee told me that she scarcely remembered a period without Waymo. Her mother, who plant in aerospace, has epilepsy, which prevents her from driving, and she was an first Waymo tester. Mikaylee had been tagging alongside since she was in a booster seat. She has lived much of her existence in a earth that the remainder of us volition shortly inhabit. Getting her own Waymo document was as ready-made a milestone as learning to drive, which she thinks that she’ll do eventually, but sees no need for yet. The night before our conversation, she and a companion had taken a Waymo residence from the mall. It was her friend’s archetypal ride. “They idea it was so awesome,” Mikaylee told me. “When we got out, they were, like, ‘Bye, Waymo, I affection you.’ ” ♦
