PHOENIX — It’s eerie at first, but you soon forget that you are riding in an all-electric Jaguar vehicle without a driver. And although there’s no need for a steering wheel, you see one swirling left and right during your car ride. As a passenger, the only meaningful decision you can make, aside from sitting in a fully autonomous car, is controlling the music.
This scenario is a reality thanks to Waymo, the self-driving taxi, which is gaining popularity across the U.S.
Could self-driving cars come to Salt Lake City?
Here in the West, you can see Waymo vehicles, lugging giant scanners on their roofs, in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Not only are they environment-friendly, they drive 24 hours a day and average 150,000 trips each week across four cities.
Waymo taxis are so popular that Uber struck a partnership with them earlier this year, and will offer the self-driving cars as on option for passengers in Austin and Atlanta in 2025. Uber will bear the responsibility of managing its autonomous fleet, while Waymo provides roadside assistance and rider support. Passengers will be able to honk the horn and open the trunk of the car using the Uber app. Lyft was a former partner until the pandemic hit. Waymo will also work with Moovie.io to bring their services to Miami in 2025.
Tokyo is set to become the first international road trip for Waymo vehicles this year.
The company, which began as a secret project at Google more than 15 years ago, has plans to continue expanding in the U.S.
“Each city is unique in its own way — whether that’s San Francisco’s famous hills or Phoenix’s dust storms,” a spokesperson from Waymo said. “However, the Waymo Driver is able to generalize to the driving task in new cities increasingly quickly, and adapts well to new conditions.”
Although Salt Lake City is a grid city — a big bonus for testing this technology — the snow creates a challenging environment. The unpredictable pattern and properties of snowfall make it tough for its scanners to detect lane markers or obstacles.
But Waymo is making progress on that front, too. Last August, it announced a winter weather testing initiative in California, Michigan and upstate New York.
Waymo is allowing their employees to test the driving system on freeways ahead of making them publicly available in the future.
They are also testing their technology on freeways in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, a spokesperson told the Deseret News on background.
The Waymo is also decked out with safety features, and can respond to hand signals and other human traffic control issues in real time.
“Safety is core to everything we do at Waymo, and is central to our mission to be the world’s most trusted driver,” he said.
How safe are self-driving cars?
So far, Waymo has been involved in one fatal collision but it wasn’t at fault, being one of the six cars that crashed in San Francisco in late January. A person and a dog in one of the cars died and others suffered injuries, according to an NBC News affiliate in San Francisco.
Waymo says it works with locals, law enforcement, first responders, lawmakers and regulators with every expansion. But there’s still pushback and concern over regulation, as no federal law oversees self-driving cars so the onus falls on the states.
In San Francisco, Waymo “paid lobbyists to meet with city government officials 348 times last year, compared with 137 times in 2023,” as the San Francisco Examiner reported. Labor unions have stood staunchly opposed to Waymo entering this market.
More recently, the outlet reported a California court rejected San Francisco’s lawsuit claim against California Public Utilities Commission for giving Waymo a permit to expand its fleet.
While these autonomous vehicles haven’t gotten into too many accidents so far, they do experience glitches.
Last month, the Waymo car my husband called for me arrived after a 15 minute-long wait, but no matter how many times he clicked the button on the app to unlock the car, the locks wouldn’t budge. Since these vehicles only wait up to five minutes for a passenger, the car left, and I was late for my appointment after a frustrating experience of glaring at a driverless car.
But some glitches are more concerning. In early January, a man traveling to the airport posted a video of himself stuck in a Waymo that wouldn’t stop going in loops in a parking lot.
“OK, why is this happening to me on a Monday?” Mike Johns asks in the video clip. “I’m in a Waymo car … and this car is just going in circles.” The video reportedly documents his interactions with a Waymo assistance agent.
“I received a notification that your car might be experiencing some routing issue,” the agent says on the video.
Johns conveyed he had a flight to catch and felt dizzy.
“Has this been hacked? What’s going on?” he asks. “I feel like I’m in the movies. Is somebody playing a joke on me?”
Is there public trust in self-driving cars?
Waymo’s mission is making roadways safer. In contrast with Waymo’s low number of accidents, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported 40,990 deaths in 2023, lower than 43,230 deaths in 2021.
These numbers might prompt the obvious conclusion that autonomous vehicles are safer. A recent study from Swiss Re, a reinsurance company headquartered in Switzerland, concurred after analyzing auto claims related to more than 25 million miles driven by humans versus the Waymo technology. It found that autonomous vehicles reduced property damage by 88% and bodily injuries by 92%.
But a 2015 study argues that road accidents are rare, and to prove such superiority in safety, researchers must look at hundreds of millions of miles worth of data.
And while Waymo is experiencing a burst in popularity and use, a poll from last year shows drivers still have concerns. According to AAA’s latest survey, 66% of Americans expressed fear about self-driving cars, while another 25% expressed uncertainly. Only 9% expressed trust in the technology.
As Philip Koopman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said during a congressional hearing on self-driving cars, “Computers might never drink and drive, or text and drive. But computers are notoriously brittle when encountering something they have not been trained on.”
“The reality is that safe software is very difficult to create, and we should expect computer drivers to make mistakes,” Koopman said. “The question is how many they will make, and how severe they will be.”