“Seeing a fully autonomous car roam around can feel a little surreal, but riding in one is becoming a reality in some major U.S. cities.
For many Americans, the kerfuffle over robotaxi services can feel foreign, since many of them still aren’t widely accessible across the country. But the companies behind these services are slowly working to take self-driving car rides into the mainstream, and locals and tourists are quickly learning to embrace them in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Ethan Teicher, a spokesperson for Waymo said Thursday it currently serves about 100,000 paid rides per week.
In those cities, downloading Waymo’s app and tapping a few buttons can get you into an autonomous Jaguar in minutes. The company, owned by Google parent Alphabet, also plans to launch the service in Austin sometime this year. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Zoox is gearing up to deploy purpose-built self-driving cars in Las Vegas in the coming months. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) And Tesla is expected to offer a first taste of its robotaxi plans in Los Angeles on Oct. 10, a development CEO Elon Musk bills as its biggest moment in the company’s history since the launch of its Model 3.
In other words, you’ll sooner or later face the option of getting ferried across town in a self-driving car. Washington Post reporters crisscrossed San Francisco — where robotaxis are widely available and are now part of everyday life here — to see how Waymos stack up against more traditional, human-centered ride-hailing services” (Velazco et al., 2024).
Outside of the rising prevalence of electric vehicles on the automotive market, self-driving cars are making headlines as they begin taking over the rideshare market. Self-driving cars aren’t an incredibly new phenomenon, but the idea of getting into an Uber without a driver is definitely still not a normal experience for those living outside of Silicon Valley.
Currently, Waymo is leading this shift in the market and slowly moving into new cities across the United States. Utilizing a fleet of Jaguar vehicles and powerful AI, Waymo cars are able to take users from one place to another all while safely adapting to the various obstacles that crowd busy city streets.
This article provided a comprehensive comparison of the experience of riding in the Waymo car compared to a more typical Lyft or Uber. While I can appreciate the lack of awkward small talk with a random driver and the increased safety of not having a stranger know where I live, it’ll probably be a few years before I can see myself getting into a Waymo without some anxiety about how the car will respond to the ever-changing nature of city traffic. Since these experiences haven’t come to Columbus yet, this was really helpful in trying to understand what this experience is like as well as its potential areas for improvement.
References
Velazco, C., Jimenez, A., & Abril, D. (2024). So you want to ride a self-driving taxi? How Waymo compares in our tests. The Washington Post . https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/12/waymo-vs-uber-lyft-cost-speed-robotaxi-rideshare/
Vyshniakova, D. (2024). Waymo Self driving taxi car in Downtown San Francisco [Photograph]. Adobe Stock. https://stock.adobe.com/search?k=waymo+car&search_type=usertyped&asset_id=734373059
