Joanne's day riding Waymo Ones
Happy new year. I’m writing to you from Chandler, AZ: Phoenix suburb and the “Self-Driving Capital of the World” according to Wired. I came out here to ride Waymo AVs and as it happens, today is the rare rainy day in town (which presented exactly the kind of complications I was hoping to encounter tbh). Why I am doing this is not exactly a secret, but I’ll discuss that more in future newsletters. In the meantime, here are quick notes on my experience of riding four fully-unself-driven driver-drove extremely un-autonomous Waymo Ones.
There was moderate rain this morning and when I tried to hail a Waymo, I got an alert that said, “All cars are busy. Please try again later.” By lunch time, the rain stopped and I finally booked a ride from Whole Foods to Target. There was another alert that said, “an autonomous specialist is accompanying this ride.”
It took about ten minutes for the car to arrive. From where I stood, I could see what looked like human hands on the steering wheel somewhat obscured by the the windshield glare. When I got in, the driver—who stayed silent as the automated voice said something like “Hello Joanne. Enjoy your ride”—was not only steering but driving the car as any ordinary driver would.
It felt a little strange to be in silence with a driver since I’m used to Lyft drivers and taxi drivers making small talk. Also, because I was expecting an AV. Also, nothing in the app or text messages said the driver/"autonomous specialist"/test driver’s name.
“Can I ask you a couple questions?” I asked. “Um, sure,” the driver said, sounding a little reluctant. I asked why he was driving and he said they were short staffed because of New Year’s and didn’t have time to set up the autonomous capability. I asked if the weather had anything to do with it and he either said “I don’t know” or “no.” At no point in the ride was the car operating autonomously. The driver was following along with what looks like ordinary Google Map directions on a phone. The sky was overcast but the rain had stopped.
Until this ride, I didn’t know that Waymo test drivers even could drive the entire length of a requested ride. It’s not like Google is advertising this service as anything but AV even when it's a mix of human driver and autonomous. Still, I might have figured the company would have stopped service instead of sending the fleet out to operate fully “manual.”
There are two screens behind the front seats that demonstrate the computer vision with blocks to represent nearby cars and circles to represent people. I found the display hypnotic and almost convincing but later realized a few notable items that the sensors were not picking up on — like puddles (I’ll get to that in a moment).
There was a bottleneck at the self-checkout line at Target, with three customers needing assistance at once. (Very apropos). After I paid for my item, I requested another car to grab coffee. Most of what I could find within Waymo’s East Valley district geofence were Starbucks locations, which felt too depressing given the other places I had been that day, so I randomly selected what appeared to be a coffee shop two miles away. The Google Maps overview warned the hours might be inaccurate due to the holiday.
The next text driver was also driving the Waymo normally. I asked this driver what was going on—was it because of the weather? The second driver told me Waymo never says why, but that’s his guess. He said it was unusual for him to be working inside the car, instead of remotely, and if I try tomorrow, there probably won’t be a test driver inside. He also told me the price of Waymos used to be much cheaper than Lyfts but I told him, I didn’t really notice a difference in price.
I got to the coffee shop, which wasn’t just closed for the holiday but out of business. Then I ordered another Waymo to the farthest Starbucks from where I was; and the car arrived within a minute. I thought it might have been the driver I just had, but it was the first driver. This was a bit awkward because I’ve revealed myself to the driver as a person just hanging around suburban Phoenix riding Waymos on New Year's day. Meanwhile, I'm trying to gage how coincidental it was that I'd get the same driver again. I suspect Waymo has a very small fleet but it's not clear how many of its cars are out on the road.
News reports from a couple years ago made it sound like self-driving cars were all over Chandler, but I only saw the ones that I hailed. (A few recent posts on Reddit suggest that the fleet has dramatically shrunk since Waymo is no longer in the testing stage but instead waiting for passengers—and since most people in Chandler have cars of their own, there really aren’t that many potential passengers).
At Starbucks, it began to rain moderately again and the sky was dark. I tried to hail another Waymo but again I saw the alert, “All cars are busy. Please try again later.” I reached out to customer service in the very minimal app. The representative said service would return in fifteen minutes. When I asked if this was due to the weather, my question went unanswered—although twice the representative appeared to be typing but abandoned whatever response she was composing.
About fifteen minutes passed when I successfully hailed another car. The wait time was 40 minutes, which struck me as strange since it wouldn’t take 40 minutes to get from one corner of Chandler to another. Nevertheless, the app said “your car [is finishing] its trip with the current rider.”
My fourth trip, the third driver, told me none of the cars were operating autonomously. I asked if I might get one tomorrow and he said maybe but it depends on if the roads dry fast enough because of the puddles. (Puddles—and left-hand turns—are a major threat to AVs with the risk of hyroplaning).
So I did not ride in an AV. Inevitably I'll have the chance sometime in the future. My impression of everything else, in the meantime, is that it feels creepy from Google's general dishonesty to the bare bones-to-non-existent approach to customer service. Why doesn’t Google say that the cars are driven by humans in the rain? Why are the test-driver clearly instructed to pretend they are invisible? (Like emotion labor in reverse). Why is it all so secretive when obviously weather conditions present challenges to AV technology?
It rains eight inches a year on average in Phoenix, so I understand this was an atypical day. Anyway, I don't expect to see these cars in Boston—47 inches of rain, 48 inches of snow annually—anytime soon.