It’s only two years since I was last in Los Angeles but when I drove my renter north from the airport up Coast Highway towards Santa Monica, I noticed a profound change in the people with whom I was sharing the road.
Or more correctly, the absence of people in the driver’s seats of the ubiquitous white sedans with things that looked like mini wind generators protruding from their roofs. I pulled over behind one to get a better look and watched as two people got out of the back seat and the car took off empty! What the… Welcome to the world of Waymo, the Google-owned pioneer “robotaxi” brand.
In little more than a year, Waymo has expanded from its initial low key trials in San Francisco and Silicon Valley to LA and Phoenix and now Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia. By the middle of next year the service will be available along most of the US East Coast, from Miami to Washington DC, with an international push starting with Tokyo.
According to Google and independent analysts, the speed of the Waymo rollout puts it way ahead of Elon Musk’s “Tesla Taxi”. When will it get to Australia? Well, that’s up to the Australian government’s leading automotive body, the National Transport Commission, which calls automated vehicles “revolutionary” and a “gamechanger,” and is expected to pave the way for a small number of vehicles to be imported here as soon as 2026.
Yikes, that’s three months away! I had a vague idea that “autonomous” but driver-driven vehicles were already operating on Australian roads, but I decided to make it my mission while in LA to test the Waymo.
Since for the last part of my stay I was living with friends in Pacific Palisades, just up the hill from Santa Monica, which has the biggest concentration of driverless vehicles in the city, getting one was no problem, however getting the app to call one was temporarily beyond my seriously malfunctioning techno kit. At 2.30am, after changing passwords and punching in number codes about 100 times, while drinking deeply from a sensational decanter of 25-year-old Russian River Shiraz, I let out a rebel yell which shook the mansion. I was in! I booked my driverless ride for 11am, went to bed and woke at four, thinking, is this something, like say bungy jumping, that I really want to do?
Answer: hell, yeah!
Waiting for my ride in the driveway, I suddenly realised that the address I had given the app was not where I was standing. Although this was the main entrance to my friends’ house, their official address is on the other side of the property. I ran around the block to the other entrance just as my Waymo appeared, precisely at 11. I used the app instructions to unlock the back door and climbed in. “Hi Phil,” said no one, “Welcome to your Waymo ride. Please fasten your seat belt and do not attempt to touch the steering wheel.” No ma’am.
As we took off and no one deftly negotiated the first right turn, I remembered that there are only two ways down the hill from the Palisades, and both of them involve steep drops around blind corners. As we dropped down off the mesa, a cyclist came towards us in the middle of the road. We pulled over and let him pass. Then a skateboarder came snaking down the hill past my passenger window. Had no one seen him? Yes.
I began to relax. In fact I began to realise that my robot driver was a lot more talented than a real one like me. I sat back and listened to the chill grooves while I counted the number of other Waymos we passed – 11 in 20 minutes. When my destination loomed no one told me how grateful she was that I had chosen Waymo and hoped that she’d see me again soon, as my ride edged into a tight park right in front of the café. The ride back was just as efficient and pleasant. How did I rate it? 9/10. I missed having a chat. But not much.
The very next day I was enjoying a lunch with a bunch of old salts, none of whom had experienced a Waymo ride, but one, a top techy with Apple, told me how it worked. “It’s a very simple piece of programming. It just replicates driver probability.”
I found this a little alarming, thinking of a robot replicating the probability of a driver like me assessing the survivability of overtaking on a blind corner, so I did some research and found this on the Waymo site: “The Waymo Driver’s perception system takes complex data gathered from its advanced suite of car sensors, and deciphers what’s around it using AI – from pedestrians to cyclists, vehicles to construction, and more. The Waymo Driver also responds to signs and signals, like traffic light colours and temporary stop signs.”
Got that? I can’t wait for my next ride.
FOOTNOTE: Second stop on the WSL World Longboard Tour at Bells Beach last weekend was awesome! Great waves and huge Noosa representation in the water and in the commentary booth. More about that next week, but enjoy the preview pix here.
