Of all my recurring anxiety dreams, my least favorite is the one where I’m in a car. It always begins with me driving, but eventually I realize that for some reason I’m sitting in the back seat. My arms can’t reach the steering wheel, my legs can’t reach the pedals, and I’m stuck in a spiral of terror, careening around turns and accelerating toward obstacles until, gasping, I wake up.
This is a bit like the passenger experience in Waymo’s self-driving cars. You climb into the back seat of a minivan, and watch in awe – or horror – as the wheel turns itself above an entirely empty driving seat.
“We made you live your nightmare,” a Waymo staffer joked to me after I exited one of the company’s fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans, following a quick drive inside the company’s 91-acre testing site in California’s Central Valley. The good news, and the key difference between my nightmares and Waymo’s dreams of a self-driving future: everyone survived.
Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out of Google, arranged these rides for a bus full of journalists at its formerly secret testing site in a decommissioned air force base about 100 miles east of San Francisco on Monday. The cars are the same ones that have been picking up passengers in Phoenix, Arizona, for several months, and the existence of the testing site, known as “Castle”, was revealed in the Atlantic in August. But amid a growing backlash against tech monopolies in the US and European Union, and with congressional hearings on Google, Facebook and Twitter’s role in a Russian influence operation to sway the presidential elections coming up this week, perhaps Waymo’s parent, Alphabet, thought it was a good time to show off some of the cool things that the tech industry is still capable of doing.
Like making cars drive themselves. Which is still pretty cool, despite what appear to be Waymo’s best efforts to make it as uncool as possible.
It’s not just the minivans, which, compared with Tesla’s falcon-winged Model X and Uber’s sleek, semi-autonomous SUVs, rate pretty low on the cool car quotient. The company’s watchwords, which staffers repeated again and again, are “capable, reliable and safe”. They might not evoke sexy Blade Runner visions of Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, but they definitely make sense for a company that needs to convince parents to put their children in them.
So not for Waymo the cowboy approach of Uber, which put semi-autonomous SUVs on the streets of San Francisco without receiving the proper permit from the California department of motor vehicles. Instead, the company plied journalists with mason jars of ahi tuna and miniature cast-iron skillets of shrimp while showing off its use of what it calls “structured testing” – ie tricky scenarios complete with pedestrians, bicyclists and other cars for the minivans to run through.
The scenarios play out on the specially designed streets of Castle, where Waymo has built a fake city, minus most of the buildings. The company has paved roads with cul-de-sacs, roundabouts, intersections, and curves galore.
We watched as a Waymo minivan was cut off by a speeding convertible and (nearly) backed into by an oblivious hatchback. Then a quartet of employees dressed in witch hats – it was the day before Halloween – created a scenario in which a stack of moving boxes toppled into the street just as another car passed in the opposite direction. Throughout the day, the cars perform impressively, driving with the level of care you might take if you had a wedding cake in the backseat..
Despite having dragged 40 journalists 100 miles east of San Francisco to watch these demonstrations, Waymo was less than forthcoming about what it was planning to do with these vehicles. The company has laid out four ways that its technology could be made available to the public: a ride-hailing program, trucking and logistics, partnerships with cities to add “last-mile” rides to existing public transit systems, and/or private ownership of self-driving cars. But Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, wouldn’t divulge which of these was likely to come to market first, or on what kind of timeline.
Instead, the day seems designed to reinforce just how incredible it is that Waymo is succeeding in developing this technology at all. There are countless variables at play, from the velocity of a nearby bicycle to the sun in the eyes of the other drivers on the road. The task of programming software to anticipate and react to all those scenarios is unimaginably complex.
It made me wonder whether the fact that we allow 16-year-olds with cellphones in their hands to take on the task might be the true nightmare after all.
