The unsolvable problem with Waymo’s self-driving taxis

Don't look now, but the future is here. Actual self-driving cars are real and sharing the road in American cities right now thanks to Waymo's robotaxi service. But there's still a big problem: the rest of us.

So much has happened in the last five years that it's easy to forget how big the hype was around self-driving cars in the late 2010s. It’s really died down since then thanks to mounting costs, the limits of tech, and high-profile crashes. But all along Waymo kept developing its tech stack and launched its self-driving taxis in Phoenix in 2020 before expanding to San Francisco and Los Angeles by the end of 2023.

Laugh at the stupid issues all you want, we sure do, but it is a legitimately incredible technical milestone. Imagine telling someone in 2010 that in 15 years there will be fleets of hundreds of robotaxis serving major cities without causing chaos.

But it hasn’t all been smooth, and the biggest problem isn’t Waymo’s cars screwing up on their own—it’s other people screwing them up. We’re not just talking about people lighting them on fire. Instead, because they look so different with their lidar and camera arrays, we’re seeing that human drivers treat Waymos like something to be ignored or disregarded or messed with, not as simply another car in traffic. And Waymo’s necessarily cautious programming, despite also being trained on real human driving behaviors, will never be able to fully account for that.

This is especially important as Waymo recently began its first freeway rides, raising the stakes considerably after being limited to surface streets. On top of that, it just announced the next state that will see its self-driving cars: Florida

0:00 Real self-driving cars
1:05 Waymo's path to robotaxis
3:17 Too cautious?
4:40 Human judgment
6:35 The limits of tech
8:54 Advantage self-driving
11:29 Florida: the final frontier

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