My Waymo Adventure

To boldly ride in the back seat.

You can call me a daring and courageous and visionary “high-tech” pioneering trailblazer with nerves of steel if you want, but recently I took a solo trip on the roads of Miami in a Waymo self-driving car.

I will reveal later whether or not I survived, but first let me give you a technical explanation of how these amazing futuristic machines work.

This is one of the Waymo cars I rode in.

Each Waymo vehicle is equipped with 29 cameras as well as an array of laser, radar and audio sensors, which collect literally millions of data points per second and feed them to a sophisticated AI-controlled onboard computer, which is in constant, instantaneous contact via satellite with a 14-year-old boy somewhere in Asia — he goes by “Kevin” — who steers your car remotely with a joystick.

No, that’s probably not how it works. I have no idea how it works. I do not fully understand how toasters work. But however Waymo does it, it has to be a better system for operating vehicles than the one we currently employ in Miami, which involves using Miami drivers.

Miami drivers are the WORST. That is not just my opinion: That is the conclusion of a recent study of annoying driving behavior in 40 U.S. cities, which found that Miami drivers are the most annoying of all, with a score of 98.50 out of a possible 100. By contrast, New York City — where the default mode for car horns is “honking,” so that drivers have to press the horn button only on those rare occasions when they want it to stop — had a score of only 81.02. Amateurs.

The study ranked Miami drivers as the most annoying in the nation for behaviors such as speeding, texting, texting while speeding, texting while speeding and eating a breakfast burrito while also sipping a latte and simultaneously applying nail polish, never signaling anything, not having the vaguest understanding of the concept of “lanes,” refusal to yield to anybody or anything including inanimate objects such as buildings, being too busy texting to notice that the light has turned green which is why the cars behind you are honking you stupid idiot, and just generally being assholes annoying.

Miami drivers also ranked worst for aggressive driving behaviors such as tailgating, cutting people off and getting into confrontations. The study does not specifically mention firearms, but I’m fairly confident that Miami leads the nation, if not the world, in instances of motorists indicating their displeasure with other motorists by shooting at them, which is why when I worked at the Miami Herald I had bumper stickers printed up that said:

I never actually put this sticker on my car, for fear that some Miami motorist might take offense and shoot at me. (You think I’m kidding. I am not kidding.)

My point is that I, for one, welcome the arrival of Waymo’s self-driving cars. Even if they’re not perfect — even if there’s some “glitch” in their software that causes them, at random times, to deliberately aim at pedestrians or oncoming trucks — they would still be above-average drivers in Miami.

So I was excited when Waymo announced that it was beginning operations here. I immediately went on the Waymo app and requested a ride. I invited Michelle to accompany me, but she declined on the grounds that she was busy, and also (she didn’t say this part out loud) she preferred not to die in a horrific fiery crash. I assured her that Waymo cars are actually much safer than human-operated vehicles, according to statistics provided by Google, which...

...OK, it turns out that Google owns Waymo. But my feeling is, if we can’t trust huge unfathomably rich and powerful and secretive tech corporations with our lives, who can we trust? So I was undaunted by Michelle’s concerns.

OK, maybe not completely undaunted. I admit I was experiencing a few daunts as I stood on the sidewalk, waiting for my Waymo — one man, alone, about to boldly venture into the unknown, very much like Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 took off from New York in a tiny single-engine plane and headed out, solo, across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, with no guarantee that he would ever make it to Europe, let alone catch his connecting flight.

After I had been boldly standing on the sidewalk for several minutes my Waymo arrived, whirring driverlessly to a stop. It took me a minute to figure out how to open the door — you have to tap the “Unlock” button on your phone — after which I got into the back seat, closed the door, buckled my seatbelt, tapped the “Start Trip” button and settled back into my seat as the Google brain-probe needle inserted itself, smoothly and painlessly, into my skull.

No, that did not happen, as far as I know. What happened was, the car, with nobody in the driver’s seat, started driving itself — turning the steering wheel, accelerating, braking, signaling turns — while soft music played and an invisible lady with a soothing voice gave me an airline-style safety briefing. She also addressed any privacy concerns I might have, assuring me that the Waymo’s microphones are usually turned off. “So sing your heart out!” she said. “We can’t hear you.” I fact-checked this claim, as you’ll hear in this video:

How good a driver is Waymo? Pretty good! At least my Waymo was: It was smooth and decisive without being aggressive, and it responded immediately and correctly to all the activity around it, both vehicular and pedestrian. It worked its way through heavy traffic, negotiated some clogged narrow streets and got me efficiently to my destination without hitting anything. My only criticism is that it’s too polite for Miami. At one point, another car cut us off, and the Waymo merely braked to avoid a collision without making any effort to let the other motorist know that he was an idiot. I think this flaw could easily be corrected by modifying the Waymo design to incorporate a robotic Digital Gesture Of Disapproval Module (DGODM) as depicted in this conceptualization:

Other than that, the Waymo concept seems pretty solid. It took me safely from my house to my local independent bookstore, Books and Books, and back, a trip of about 3.5 miles and 15 minutes each way; the fares, which you will be pleased to know are fully tax-deductible if you’re writing about this topic for your Substack, were $25.26 going and $21.84 returning.

I had a question about the fares, so on the ride home I pressed the button on the console to connect with Rider Support, and I had the following conversation with what I am pretty sure was an actual human:

So there’s no tipping on Waymo. At least not as of now. Things could change if “Kevin” decides he needs a new scooter.

Anyway, that’s my report on Waymo, which is whirring its way soon to a city near you whether you like it or not. So let’s find out what you always-thoughtful paying subscribers think about this.