Autonomous vehicles: Dystopian scourge or Pixar characters come to life? To find out, I took a Waymo ride across town.
Waymo is the Google AV available through Uber. To call one, you request a ride through Uber and hope for the best. Sometimes you get a Waymo and sometimes you get a human driver. You can’t specify. What you can do is cancel and try again if it gives you a human driver. Or you can just go to Congress Street, where there are lots of Waymos driving around and order a ride from there.
The car gives you a friendly spiel when you get in, then notifies you whenever it turns onto a new street. At the end of the ride, it tells you how to get out of the car and reminds you not to leave your phone and keys behind.
It handles impediments well. At one point a car stopped in front of us to let someone out. The Waymo started to go around it, then stopped when the driver-side rear door opened. We waited until the other car started moving again.
Uber also partners with another company called Avride. I don’t know whether those cars are available yet or are still being tested, but there are a lot of them driving around downtown Austin. There’s also an Amazon car called Zoox, which is currently being tested.
But I had to keep reminding myself that it was futuristic. Overall, it felt like a Disneyland ride. I was a little disappointed that it didn’t tell me to keep my arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.
