Waymo

This morning when I used Uber to get a ride from my hotel to the conference it offered me a Waymo self-driving vehicle.  I've never been in one before so I thought I'd give it a go.

It arrived in the car park to pick me up, and the Uber app alerted me it was there (as it would any ride) and gave me a button to unlock the car.  I got in, and then hit another button in the app to start the ride.

The Waymo vehicles are electric Jaguar i-Pace cars heavily modified with extra camera and sensor pods at each corner, and a roof mounted pod with cameras pointing in all directions.  There are spinning radar sensors on top of the roof and on the back, and two more sensor pods on the front.  Apparently it uses a combination of imaging, radar, lidar and ultrasound...  The spinning bit on top also has an LED display that shows the initials of the person who booked the ride on arrival, and also alerts other road users when it is letting people out.

I found it slightly unnerving at first when it set off.  I don't think it's so much because it was self driving as because there was a conspicuously empty drivers seat and a steering wheel spinning round without anyone touching it.  There is a button to get the car to pull over at any time, and one for assistance from a call centre.  But that's it as far as controlling the driving is concerned.  You can adjust the temperature and map display for comfort though.

I hadn't appreciated when I booked it that it couldn't go on freeways so had to take a slightly long way round, but fortunately I wasn't in a rush.  It took about twice as long as my normal Uber the previous day, at about 25 minutes.

Generally the driving was smooth and aside from the slight uncanniness of the empty drivers seat I felt safe an confident.  Sometimes the positioning on the road seemed odd - not wrong or dangerous, just not quite what I'd have done.  Once it briefly applied the brakes quite hard, but released them again almost instantly.  This seemed to be in response to a vehicle in another lane (driven by a sloppy human) wandering a little.  We passed a few other Waymo vehicles (and followed one for a bit) and they didn't cause any issues.  The car was also quite hesitant picking a drop off spot at the convention centre.  It was a complex environment with lots of cars dropping off and people moving around.  A human driver would have waited until they were confident they had somewhere to go, then gone for it (and expected others to keep out the way).  The Waymo was less confident and kept stopping, starting and changing course.  Never dangerous (quite the opposite) but not very smooth.

Overall it was a positive experience.  I wouldn't hesitate to use Waymo again if I had time to take a route avoiding freeways.

It's incredibly impressive that it works at all and I'm really confident in its safety.  It's some way from being like a human driver though.  I can imagine it would work much better in a world which was all autonomous vehicles - the less than smooth bits were all related to the messy (but perfectly normal) human driving.

All in all a fun new experience.

This afternoon it hit 37°C, which is WAY too hot for me to be outside. I was finished earlier today so I had thought I might go for a run, but I decided that in this heat it was a really bad idea...