Make way for Waymo

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: does the future of driving look driverless?

Autonomous vehicles, or AVs, are already part of city life in places like Austin, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. Tesla recently announced plans to roll out its Robotaxis on Nevada’s highways later this year. And Google’s Waymo is hitting the streets in Denver by next year.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s been almost a decade in the making. Phoenix, Arizona became the proving ground back in 2016. By 2020, Waymo was offering fully autonomous rides there. Still, despite an exceptional track record, people remain uneasy about trusting their lives to an empty driver’s seat.

WORLD’s Emma Eicher went for a spin in a Waymo to find out what it’s really like.

WAYMO: Hello, from Waymo! This experience may feel futuristic, but the need to buckle up is the same as always. So keep your seatbelt fastened please …

EMMA EICHER: Waymo offers a luxury roadtrip. Calm, ambient music plays. An electric Jaguar engine hums beneath the black leather seats. There’s a screen in the center console to change the music, or tap a button to talk to a real person at Waymo headquarters.

WAYMO: We’ll do all the driving. So please don’t touch the steering wheel or pedals, during your ride. We may use interior cameras, check on riders, improve our products, and more.

The wheel rotates on its own, and the turn signals click on automatically. Waymo uses a combination of radar, cameras, and sensors to assess the road. The experience is supposed to be relaxing, but the car makes abrupt starts and stops.

At the Phoenix airport, some out-of-towners take pictures of the Waymos as they roll up to the curb. One couple hails from Philadelphia, where AVs haven’t yet arrived.

AIRPORT COUPLE: I’m not sure I’m ready to get in a car without a driver just yet. Maybe local, but not here on the highway.

The idea of driverless cars has been around since Ford’s Model A. And there’s no shortage of cinema depicting futuristic machines. Like the 1977 horror film The Car, where a driverless car runs down pedestrians. Eventually, the police chase it up a mountain.

RAY: Got him! He’s driving himself up there. Yahoo, come on guys!

Many of these stories are pessimistic. The technology eventually fails in the end. Or, in the worst cases, the cars go rogue.

A 2024 video promoting Waymo seemed to acknowledge that negative perception.

WAYMO: Well, it’s finally happening. The robots. They’re coming…

Almost fifty years on from movies like The Car, autonomous vehicles are fast becoming reality.

WAYMO: Hm. Maybe that’s a good thing.

And they’re expanding—especially in America’s big cities.

Companies like Google and Tesla are eager to help urbanites accept them as part of city life. A few months ago, Google released an impressive six-year driving record for their Waymo fleet. Compared to human-driven cars, Waymos have 92% fewer crashes with pedestrians. And human error caused the majority of accidents involving Waymos. Google says their AVs follow cutting edge safety practices, and are generally better drivers than humans.

But how safe is “safe enough”?

BRYAN REIMER: Do I think Waymo vehicles are doing really well on our roads? Absolutely. Do I think they have reached the North Star of safety? No.

Bryan Reimer is a research scientist for transportation logistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

REIMER: At the end of the day, safety is not so simple, and causation is something that we need to dive deep into understanding so we can hone these systems over the decades ahead.

AVs are still fairly unregulated. States have their own mixes of laws, and there’s no federal licensing rules for operating AVs. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is primarily focused on collecting data on the A.I. in autonomous vehicles, and they don’t enforce specific safety standards for sensors or cameras.

Recently, Tesla’s robotaxis came under fire for using inaccurate 360 degree cameras, posing major safety issues.

GABE KLEIN: There is no rating system per se right now…

Gabe Klein is the former head of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation.

He says there will be some roadblocks, as regulators navigate the new industry, but the future is bright.

KLEIN: I think it's going to be complex. It's gonna take some time to work out, but they're definitely here. They definitely can impact safety for the better. And what we want is the right tool to be used for the right job.

Still, AVs are limited to certain areas of the country: mainly, cities with good weather. So it’ll be difficult for a fully autonomous car to become a mainstay with the American public until they’re more reliable in less predictable conditions. Tesla has been making inroads with their Full Self Driving feature, but the electric car’s popularity plummets outside urban areas.

As networks of AVs expand, many of the top players in the industry see car ownership changing with it. But America’s landscape revolves around transportation, especially out in the country. And MIT researcher Reimer says many people aren’t ready to let go of their own cars just yet.

REIMER: At least in America, where car ownership is a status symbol, and many of us live miles apart in rural America, outside of dense urban cities, car ownership is going to succeed for as long as I have to worry.

Reimer recently authored a book called How to Make A.I. Useful. And in it, he explains the uphill battle: it will take time to fully integrate AVs using A.I. into city infrastructure.

But in the meantime, there may be a much more obvious solution to society’s need for smarter, more efficient cars.

REIMER: I do believe highly automated features are going to evolve in the decades ahead, where we will potentially subscribe to an automated driver who can pilot my car from one point to another.

Reimer envisions semi-autonomous vehicles which still rely on humans to make the executive decisions. On our way to get ice cream with the grandparents, we tell the car which street to take. The car uses A.I. to take care of the rest—getting us from point A to point B.

WAYMO: You’re here. Please make sure it’s clear before exiting.

As the technology improves, AVs are likely to make certain aspects of our lives easier. And in the meantime, we’ll still need to keep at least one hand on the wheel.

REIMER: The real value to AI, to me, is not replacing us, it's amplifying us. It's really much like the computer, the smartphone. It is providing me with tools that can allow me to do things better.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Emma Eicher in Phoenix.

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