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| Look Ma - no hands! No body, either! Watching that leather-wrapped steering wheel spin about in the air is a funky experience. |
Some say it's the future of personal transportation.
Others fear it's automation's stranglehold on, well, our auto-focused nation.
Whatever it's going to become, I tried it for myself yesterday evening with a friend in Dallas. We took a Waymo from his apartment to a restaurant and back. And you know what? It was very cool, and surprisingly fun.
And people who know me know I don't use those two terms much.
Waymo has been operating in Dallas and other select cities for over a year, and uses customized Jaguar electric crossovers fitted with all sorts of weird-looking contraptions that substitute for human driving. Those contraptions contain cameras and other equipment like specialized radar (called "LiDAR") that together capture most of the information human drivers need to operate a motor vehicle. It's called an autonomous vehicle, because all of those technological components are designed to drive the car instead of a living, breathing, thinking person.
Except... the "thinking" part of our human driving equation seems to be sorely lacking these days, right?
Just a few years ago, this concept of autonomous driving seemed futuristically bizarre, but last night, it seemed almost seamless.
Tesla is developing its own fleet of autonomous vehicles in Dallas and elsewhere, and their sleek two-seater coupes sheathed in distinctive gold-colored plastic panels are everywhere. But they're still being "trained" with human beings behind the wheel, except in Austin, where last week Tesla launched its driverless service.
Waymo, meanwhile, has become the established autonomous taxi company for Dallas, and aside from its vehicles sometimes getting stranded in high water during downpours, there have been no serious complications to their experiment. And since we haven't had any rain in over a month, I didn't think we'd encounter any flooded streets last night - which was clear and hot.
My friend lives on a street that is currently being rebuilt - literally, with new rebar, concrete, and curbs - so the construction zone already provides a tricky scenario for seasoned human drivers. Indeed, when I arrived in my old Honda, the young woman piloting a conventional Tesla in front of me lingered in the intersection for ages before deciding how to proceed through the poorly-marked area.
Dirt and dust covered lane markings on the drastically narrowed streetscape, so my friend and I wouldn't have been surprised if our approaching Waymo, upon discovering the mess, changed course for a clearer street surface. Plus, Waymo's app told us to wait next to an unconventional parking lot whose pavement blends into the street - not something I'd have expected a computer program to automatically decipher. But no - our white Jaguar rolled up to within a couple of car lengths of where we were standing, and the digital sign atop its passenger cabin had "TL" on it - to identify it as our ride!
I punched a button on their app to unlock the doors, whose handles popped out for us. We got in, the air was fresh and cold and odorless, and light jazz purred from surround-sound speakers. The seats and carpeted flooring were immaculately clean. A soothing female voice welcomed us and invited us to sit back, buckle up, and enjoy the ride. And we were off!
Our car decisively navigated the construction zone with aplomb, including unhelpfully-double-parked vehicles nearby. It made an odd turn away from what we'd presumed would be its choice cross-street, until we realized the car's computer was sending it back to a closer traffic light. As we glided down Dallas' notoriously pock-marked streets, our Jaguar's on-board cameras seemed to pick and choose which potholes were the worst, and avoided them as well as most normal human drivers can. It all seemed effortless and calming to me. We arrived at the restaurant - albeit through its unglamorous back entrance, past overflowing dumpsters - and without any ceremony, our ride was concluded.
No drama, no confusion, no frustration. No hunting for a parking space in the crowded parking lot between high-rise apartments, office towers, and a supermarket.
Frankly, the way urban transportation is supposed to be, right?
I was laughing out loud: The whole experience having been far less fraught than a normal human-piloted trip can possibly be in a place like Dallas.
By the numbers, it cost $9.18 to travel 2.3 miles in approximately 10 minutes (times are rounded up).
After dinner, I simply summoned another Waymo on their app, and it arrived within three minutes. It rolled past where the app had told us to stand and wait, but maybe that was to get the vehicle directly out of a traffic lane. Even after we got inside, an impatient BMW tried to cut off our Jaguar, but our onboard computers asserted themselves and quickly claimed our rightful right-of-way, and the BMW backed off.
Almost immediately after that, as my friend and I were laughing in admiration at the Waymo's pluck, we felt our car swerving. We noticed its computers had detected what appeared to be a large, sturdy cardboard box top that had been left in the driveway beside those dumpsters. We hadn't seen it in the darkness, but that LiDAR - Waymo's high-tech "radar" - had! Wow, we were impressed.
The only maneuver I didn't like was when our Jaguar, while waiting at a stop sign to make a right-hand turn, went ahead and pulled out onto the major three-lane cross-street while two lanes still had vehicles approaching us. I don't like it when human drivers do that - I'm always afraid they're going to come into my lane - so I don't appreciate the fact that computers do it also. But that would be my only negative comment about either trip. At least our Jaguar accelerated quickly after precisely nailing that turn. Drivers who cut me off and then dawdle along in front of me make me wonder if my Honda is invisible or something.
On my very first Uber ride - which, coincidentally, happened only a couple of months ago - I tried to tell my driver a shortcut to get to my house. But the poor fellow, who obviously had been trained to rely solely on his on-board map app, got confused by my attempt to "help" him. So my friend advised me before we got into this Jaguar not to offer driving tips to our computer.
But I did it anyway - purely by instinct, apparently. We were sitting at Oak Lawn and Blackburn, where any Dallasite will recognize this intersection as a place where eastbound Oak Lawn takes a rather sharp left turn to head towards Highland Park. But it's still Oak Lawn. Nevertheless, our Waymo turned on its left-turn signal, even though we were in the right-hand lane, and were continuing on the same street.
So I automatically advised our Waymo (as if a human operator was monitoring our ride from San Jose or Beijing or Austin) that it didn't need to use its left-turn signal. And my friend, in the back seat, burst out laughing.
"You're giving instructions to a Waymo!" he chortled. And I laughed at my own hubris, too. And the Waymo kept its turn signal on until completing its travel through the intersection.
Stubborn computer.
"Maybe we human drivers are supposed to be doing that?" wondered my friend. He's always been tech-savvy, giving the benefit of the doubt to computers. Shucks, we met when we both worked at an Internet technology company years ago. And I've always been the Luddite in our relationship.
He's taken Waymos before, so this wasn't novel for him. But last night was for me. During dinner, he asked if I could see how the Waymo experience could become the standard for the future. And yes, I agreed that it probably could, at least in highly-populated urban areas like north Dallas.
"I doubt places like Ames, Iowa, for example, have the population density to support the investment in street training and software development that's been expended in Dallas," I mused. But what do I know? A few years ago, this type of technology for Dallas seemed remote as well.
I drove myself home in my old Honda and didn't mind having to work at the wheel. But then again, it was late enough in the evening so traffic wasn't excruciating.
Several months ago, after they'd become ubiquitous in Dallas, my friend asked me about my comfort level with autonomous vehicles. I replied that my comfort level was fairly low, since I didn't understand how safe and reliable they were.
So my friend rephrased his query:
"Okay, would you prefer more of the same type of horrible driving we're seeing from so many human motorists today? Or would you prefer the logical type of driving computers are performing with no major accidents on the same streets?"
And I realized he has a great point. The more I've thought about it, considering how utterly selfish most drivers have become today, I really don't want to share the road with all those folks. Because they're not interested in sharing the road - they obviously don't care about me or anybody else.
Not that computers "care" either. But at least their algorithms are designed to accommodate each other, not to mention rogue human drivers. And aside from that "casual" right-hand turn, my two initial rides last night didn't convince me otherwise.
Granted, some people think I drive as poorly as all the other drivers about whom I complain. So maybe me taking Waymos would make our streets safer, too.
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