(enticing music)
- Hey it's Andy with "The Verge."
I'm about to go for a ride
in one of Waymo's fully driverless cars,
here in Phoenix, Arizona.
As you can see, there is no driver in the front.
I'm not nervous.
Are you nervous?
I'm not nervous.
Here we are, riding in a minivan
with nobody in the front seat, with pedestrians,
and cyclists and other vehicles out on a public road.
It's a surreal experience.
Google has been working on self-driving cars
for over 10 years now.
In 2016, Google spun out its project
as a separate company called Waymo.
And since then, it's been testing hundreds of vehicles
here in Arizona,
mostly for an Uber-like ride hailing service
called Waymo One.
Few years ago, I had the chance
to ride in one of Waymo's driverless vehicles,
but it was on a private enclosed course.
And since then, most of the trips that Waymo does
in its autonomous vehicles,
including the one that we took last year,
have trained safety drivers in the front seat, until now.
It says, "Good morning, Waymo rider.
"Our destination is Baby Kay's Cajun Kitchen."
It's asking me to start the ride, so let's do that.
- [Waymo Car Voice] Heading to Baby Kay's Cajun Kitchen.
Please make sure your seat belt is fastened.
- All right, so we're pulling out of this
parking lot right now and onto a public road.
Oh, there goes another Waymo car.
As you can see, we're in the Waymo central here.
They just waved to us.
I don't think they knew that maybe wasn't anybody
in the front seat there.
And then we just made a right-hand turn,
and changed lanes into the center lane.
It's very natural.
So here comes some construction right here,
which is very challenging for self-driving cars.
And it kind of handled it with really no problem at all.
It slowed down a bit, now it's changing lanes.
And it just kinda breezed past that construction site
there as if it was being driven by a human, quite honestly.
This is our destination.
Nothing really eventful to speak of.
Now, it's coming back right now,
and we're gonna take it for a ride
back to where we came from, which is the Watershed.
Waymo was nice enough to let us choose the pick up spot
and the destination for where we're going.
We had to vet it with them first,
but still, it's nice to know
that there's a little bit of dynamic decision making
going on here with this car.
I'll get in first, if you don't mind.
All our stuff is still here.
That's great.
We can trust these robots.
This time I'm gonna press the button up here
on the headliner, which is another way
that we can get the car to get going.
That was a pretty nice acceleration there,
not as cautious as you maybe expect.
It felt very organic.
Yeah, that's really, really weird,
seeing the steering wheel move on its own like that.
I like the notice on the steering wheel, too.
It says, do not touch steering wheel or pedals,
the vehicle will pull over.
As sort of a warning to anyone
that might try to mess with the driverless car.
Looks like we're gonna be taking
a right-hand turn here on Henkel,
which looks like it's gonna be into some
bit of residential area.
So away from the more heavily traffic commercial zone
that we are in and into a more of a residential zone.
Interesting.
So it looks like we're making a bit of a routing correction.
We're going back the way we came, and the car is making
some adjustments into the route that it's choosing.
Obviously, we'll allow that. (laughs)
We have to make some allowances
for a car with nobody in the front seat.
It'll be interesting to see how Waymo smooths out
some of those things, though, going forward,
as this becomes a service that is available to more people.
And it looks like we're gonna be turning
into the left turning lane as we approach our destination.
And this is the part where I get a selfie
for my own purposes.
I'm about to take a left turn in a fully driverless car.
- [Waymo Car] Arriving shortly at Watershed.
- We did it!
And we're making our way slowly around the parking lot
to drop us off at the entrance to The Watershed.
And then we'll be done and we will say goodbye to our Waymo.
Oh, it stopped for the pigeons, you love to see it.
You absolutely love to see them stopping for the pigeons.
No other company is testing fully driverless vehicles
at the scale and speed that Waymo is.
The company has trained its AI with a vast data set
of images and driving scenarios.
It has a highly detailed high-def map of the whole area
down to the centimeter.
It took Waymo a decade to get to this point,
where it felt confident enough in the safety
of its technology to pull drivers out of the driver seat.
But, you know, only for a tightly controlled
50 square mile area, mostly suburban
and mostly dry conditions, with a pretty basic road layout.
And these vehicles aren't totally alone in the wilderness.
Waymo has a team of remote employees
that watch the real time feed
from each of the vehicle's eight cameras,
and can help with the touch of a button
if the software runs into a tricky spot
and needs a human eye to figure it out.
- These folks don't joystick the car or anything like that,
but they can help answer specific questions
that a car might have about an ambiguous situation.
And that's where human intuition and human understanding
of the entire context is super important.
Like that moving van, is it really staying there?
Or is it about to start driving?
Well, if the door's down
and they're unloading a lamp out of the back,
it's gonna be there for a while.
That's not something we've gotten around to making the car
smart enough to understand, but a human sees it in a moment
and can send that signal.
So it's not really a command to the car,
it's just adding information.
- [Andy] When you think about self-driving cars,
you probably picture something from like "Minority Report"
or "Total Recall."
- Drive!
- Fully driverless cars with no one in the front seat,
or maybe no front seat at all,
or a steering wheel for that matter.
While Waymo's driverless vehicles
are getting us closer to that imagined future,
there's still a lot going on behind the scenes
that we don't see.
I mean, the level of production required
for each of these driverless vehicles is immense.
Sensors, cameras, compute, AI,
remote assistance operators, fleet managers.
Experts estimate that each self-driving test vehicle
could cost $400,000 alone.
And that's just taking into account the sensors and compute.
Is all of that really worth it?
Waymo seems to think so.
I mean, human beings are terrible drivers.
The vast majority of vehicle crashes, like over 90%
are because of mistakes made by human drivers.
Self-driving cars could be safer,
but we really just don't know yet.
There just aren't enough of them on the road
to really prove that out.
So we'll have to wait, until they bust out
beyond this tiny section of suburban Arizona
and to a much larger and more dangerous
and more complex world before we know
whether self-driving cars are really worth all this effort.
If you'd rather see a video about electric cars,
we just did a drive with Porsche's new all electric Taycan
outside of L.A., in the mountains.
It was a gorgeous video.
I highly recommend you check it out at youtube.com/theverge.