In November, Waymo, the autonomous ride-hailing company, opened its services to riders in Los Angeles, California. The robotaxi company already operates in San Francisco, California and Phoenix, Arizona, and plans to continue expanding into new markets.
If you haven’t already seen one on the streets, Waymo cars are pretty hard to miss. The Waymo fleet is made up of all-white, electric Jaguar SUVs that are outfitted with cameras and sensors. Most strikingly, Waymo cars operate without a human driver.
Waymo believes their self-driving cars could be the future of ridesharing. John Gravios, senior editor at Wired, spent a day with his team chasing Waymos down the streets of San Francisco to see how the robotaxi compares to a traditional rideshare.
Gravios joined “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal to talk about Wired’s piece, “Get in, Loser — We’re Chasing a Waymo into the Future.” Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: Of course, anything is better than sitting around the office or in your living room in front of your computer. Why did you guys decide to do this?
John Gravios: San Francisco has a history in car chase cinema, and we figured that the best way to make self-driving cars strange again for us was to go chase one.
Ryssdal: We should say here it’s old hat to you guys in San Francisco, but unless you’re in San Francisco, I guess, where else are they? In Phoenix, right, and I’ve seen some here in LA, but it’s a foreign thing for a whole lot of people.
Gravios: Exactly. That’s why we wanted to re-strangify it.
Ryssdal: All right so talk methodology here. How’d you go about it?
Gravios: So we hired an Uber driver to drive a chase car with a bunch of us in it and picked a Waymo by summoning it on the Waymo app. And then we tailed it. The plan was to have the journalists, some of us get out of the car and interview riders as they were let out, which we did. But it took a little while for the Waymo to pick up people.
Ryssdal: I was going to say, I don’t want to spoil it, as much as you can spoil a magazine article, but it was a tad anticlimactic.
Gravios: Yeah. It was interesting in itself to go from one weird staging lot full of empty, self-driving cars to another for the first several hours of the day, but that’s what we did.
Ryssdal: What kinds of reactions did you get from people once you track them down, what did they say about their experience in this driverless car?
Gravios: It was pretty uniform and impressive how much people just love it. They just like the experience of the drive, I guess it’s a little bit less herky-jerky than a human driver, but I think a lot of it just comes down to people are just kind of relieved not to have to talk to somebody else, as as sad as that is. Especially it was sad for us because we were having a great conversation in our chase car.
Ryssdal: Tell me about Gabe, your Uber driver, and his thoughts on this whole thing, because that was super interesting.
Gravios: So Gabe, this is a guy whose labor is directly at stake. You know, he’s a guy whose labor is going to be replaced by a Waymo. He’s had 30 years of experience as a professional driver, first as a taxi driver. He even organized a taxi driver strike in the days before Uber. His first, I think his prejudice with Waymo is having shared the road with them sort of sporadically, he thought of them as kind of dopey, rule-following, frustrating vehicles to share the road with. But over the course of the day, he started to recognize that the Waymo was driving a lot like a taxi driver. The Waymo was doing things that were aggressive, that are exactly the kinds of things that a taxi driver is trained to be aggressive with and doing things that were cautious that are exactly the kinds of things that taxi drivers are trained to be cautious with.
Ryssdal: Can we talk unit economics here? According to the math from a study you guys’ site, Waymo is not making a whole lot of money per vehicle, right? And eventually they’re going to scale, and it’s going to work out, but for the moment, even though they’ve gotten 11 billion-something-dollars, they’re not turning a whole lot of profit here.
Gravios: Yeah, that’s a big question, and the math is, even that study, based on a lot of guesswork. It’s really hard to say what the unit economics are. What we can say is that the ridership rates are going up so fast that that study is already well out of date. When we were doing our chase, I think the monthly ridership for Waymo was 100,000 rides a month. By October, it was already 150,000 rides a month. So, the economics are just shifting under our feet a lot.
Ryssdal: Are you among the Waymo rider faithful? Have you done it? What do you think?
Gravios: I do not have an account of my own, but I’ve been on rides with other people.
Ryssdal: And?
Gravios: You know, it was that experience. You’re a little nervy when you step in, and then very quickly it becomes normal.
