Here I am living my dream, sitting in the back seat of a cab driving down Missouri Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s another hot morning here in the desert, the temperature is already rising to over 100 degrees, although it’s not yet 10 o’clock.
As we turn left and drive through town, I’d like to ask the driver to turn up the air conditioning, but Houston, we have a problem. There is no driver.
The seat behind the steering wheel is empty. The indicator lights are on, but no one is home. As we corner, past a restaurant, the wheel spins and straightens, as if being moved by invisible hands. When I lean out of the back seat, is that just my imagination, or can I see the pedals going up and down as if being moved by invisible feet?
Like a bowling ball rolling down the gutter, we come to a busy intersection near 44th Street where eight lanes converge. I can hardly stand the look, but the driverless taxi obediently brakes and decelerates, leaving a cautious distance between us and the vehicle in front. The traffic light switches, my car drives off and cleverly moves into its lane in the morning rush hour.
How does it know it’s operational? What is this cursed sorcery? I drive in a robotaxi, a £130,000 all-electric Waymo Jaguar I-PACE, a car like no other.
Causes Chaos: A driverless cab refuses to move, bringing traffic to a halt in San Francisco because a door wasn’t fully closed
Martha Hubert writes a message against a proposed robotaxi expansion in San Francisco on Thursday, August 10th
The Waymo might look like a white noddy car with a silly big black button on the roof, but it’s packed with the latest automated driving technology.
Programmed with artificial intelligence, the car is equipped with sophisticated sensors, has 29 cameras and uses a radar system with millimeter wave frequencies to provide the “driver” with important terrain details as well as the distance and speed of other objects.
“Nice to see you,” chirps an automated female voice as I get into the car for the first time. “Please buckle up,” my new robo-nanny rebukes.
A small screen between the two front seats instructs passengers to “press here to start the journey”. I tap on it and it can start without delay.
The car creeps up from a parking lot to the curb, waits for a gap in traffic, and then, to my horror, quickly makes a U-turn across a four-lane freeway. A car behind us honks loudly. I swear loudly. The Waymo simply continues undeterred on its way. Almost cheeky!
Not only are we riding to conquer the promised land, I think to myself we are riding into the future. Welcome to the spooky new world of robotaxis.
After years of trial and error — and many failures, some of which are still ongoing — robo-taxis are beginning to make their sinister presence felt in America. The concept is well past its infancy: about 700 robotic taxis are currently in service in three cities — Phoenix, San Francisco, and Austin, Texas — while billions have been invested in the technology around the world.
Los Angeles will soon have its own fleet of robotic taxis, and in the UK the Law Commission released a report on automated vehicles last year, paving the way for similar services to be rolled out on UK roads, perhaps within the next decade. You come whether you like it or not.
In the US, Waymo and Cruise are currently the two largest companies offering driverless taxi services. They work on the same system as Uber; You download the app, call your ride from your phone and pay the fare from your account.
Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet — and previously Uber itself — has operated in Phoenix since 2016 but has only offered fully automated driving with its Waymo One service since 2020.
Cruise, owned by General Motors, offers a more limited service than Waymo’s 24/7 operation, but together these companies enable around 10,000 robotaxi rides for the public every week.
And even though we’re on the cutting edge of technology, there hasn’t been a lack of difficulties – unfortunately including one fatality.
In 2018, pedestrian Elaine Herzberg was hit and killed by a self-driving car in the Phoenix area.
The victim was crossing a street when she was struck by an Uber test vehicle driven by a human security driver named Rafaela Vasquez.
Vasquez had two phones on her lap at the time, one of which was streaming talent show The Voice. She said she only heard The Voice but was distracted by instructions from Uber on her other phone in the moments leading up to the accident.
The tragedy raised the question of who was responsible for a fatality in the frontier phase of self-driving cars, when humans can only monitor imperfect AI systems.
When the case finally went to court in Phoenix last month, Vasquez pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of endangerment and was sentenced to three years probation.
However, with so many motorists – on both sides of the Atlantic – continuing to use their phones while driving, the idea of a hyper-concentrated robot replacing human error and lapses in concentration is not without its appeal.
“But it’s not a panacea.” “It’s not a short-term solution to the very serious problem of driver distraction,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at South Carolina University and an expert on autonomous driving.
“I often say: Yes, we should be worried about automated driving, but we should be afraid of human driving.”
About 40,000 people die on America’s roads every year, and Smith blames “bad roads, unforgiving vehicles, and bad drivers.”
He told me: ‘The UK has far better road safety statistics than the US. Your country shows that governments that care about safety can really make a difference.” He has traveled by robo-taxis many times. “For someone who’s never been in one, it sounds scary.” Then they get in one and get bored very quickly. Or they claim it’s a perfect driver. There is no significant empirical support for either.
“A five-year-old could probably drive about a kilometer down a road and be fine. And then, you know, something happens right there.’
Susan Witka (left) and Charles Minster hold signs against a proposed robotaxi expansion in San Francisco on Thursday, August 10
Passengers board a Waymo driverless cab in San Francisco, California, USA
I think he means that the car’s safety systems would apply the brakes while a child would just yell.
Hiccups persist. In San Francisco, locals got an unwelcome glimpse into the future last week when ten driverless cruise taxis plying the city’s North Beach area all came to a synchronous stop at 11 p.m. Cruise blamed cell phone networks for the problem, claiming connectivity to their cars’ systems was impacted by the number of rock fans using their phones at a nearby music festival.
It’s an ominous thought for anyone driving in a robotaxi past Old Trafford in Manchester during a home game, or speeding across the A361 in Somerset when Glastonbury is on.
The cars, which can hardly be moved when stationary, soon led to huge traffic jams.
Meanwhile, a number of incidents in which robotic taxis failed to respond appropriately at fire scenes, even running over fire hoses, have raised serious concerns among police and firefighters.
Some local residents are also unhappy, fearing what would happen if a robotic taxi got in the way of a fire or life-threatening emergency. “Our homes in North Beach are made of sticks,” a concerned local resident told the LA Times last week.
However, San Francisco city bosses have just given the green light for a massive expansion of robo-taxis; In Phoenix, Waymo One serves 180 square miles of this sprawling sunbelt metropolitan area, making it the largest fully autonomous ride-hail service zone in the world.
It’s easy to see why Phoenix was chosen as the launch pad for Robotaxi. As the fifth largest city in America, about 20 cm of precipitation falls per year, neither snow nor ice. It lies flat on the desert floor and its streets are laid out in a neat grid pattern.
“Yes, whoever designed Phoenix was obsessed with checkers and chess,” said Billy, the human Uber driver who picked me up from the airport.
He also dared that if I wanted to go hiking in the beautiful mountains surrounding the city, I should hit the slopes at sunrise and come back two hours later or my ass would roast. This is the kind of invaluable local information you don’t get from a robot.
But why was I in an Uber and not a Waymo when the latter has been offering airport service since May, I hear you cry. Good question.
While other cities allow potential Robotaxi users from those who have signed up on a waiting list, Waymo promises its services in Phoenix will be available to anyone who downloads the app. That wasn’t my experience, possibly because my mobile phone is registered in the UK and not the US
I had tried contacting Waymo to find out if this would be an issue but they had not responded to my emails. I tried calling but the automated attendant redirects everyone back to the website.
“If you’ve seen us on the street and have feedback on our ride-sharing service or our driving habits, press one,” they ask. “Yes,” I want to say. ‘One of your cars is on fire on Thunderbird Road and Daffy Duck is trapped in it.’ Come quickly – his feathers are on fire.’ Anything to get an answer! I leave a few messages, but the only comeback is a text in French that says “715793 is your validation code for Waymo.”
Uh? But I’m not in France and I don’t see a place to enter the validation code that nobody asked for. It’s a dystopian nightmare. And these are the people I will trust my life to?
My local friend Ken ended up booking a ride for me through his Waymo app. He and his friends are regular Waymo One users, not only because they find it convenient and slightly cheaper than Uber, but because they can play their music really loud when they go to clubs.
“It was a bit incomprehensible at first,” says Ken, “because the Waymo would never get to exactly where you were.” You had to go there. But that’s not happening now.’
After I unlock my car by pressing the button on his app, Ken waves goodbye and I set off on my eight-mile drive around town. The screen tells me it will take 44 minutes, which seems excessive, but I soon understand why. My Waymo drives rather slowly in the middle lane, with traffic often overtaking us on both sides. Other than that and a few heartbreaking moments when turning or changing lanes, the ride is uneventful.
Actually, I’m starting to enjoy it. The car is spotless, the driving is smooth, the driver doesn’t dare speak his mind on Donald Trump, doesn’t eat a chicken at the wheel, speed down the freeway, or ask if you mind if he uses his phone, and then doesn’t sulk when you say “yes” .
Honestly, there are moments when I feel safer in the Waymo than in many human-driven cabs, but feeling safe is a relative thing. What feels good in charming, orderly Phoenix might feel very different in the disorderly, anarchic chaos of London.
Still, I was quite sad when the ride ended, even though Waymo awkwardly stopped right in front of a mall parking lot entrance.
The ride ended up taking 32 minutes and costing $16.19, which is slightly more than the $14.94 Uber would have charged me for the same ride.
However, look on the bright side. It might have been scary, the slowness was embarrassing at times, maybe there was a lack of human contact – but hey, at least I didn’t have to tip.
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