For the last few months, my son has been dying to ride in a Waymo. I mean, granted, he’s 13, and he’s been dying to do a lot of things, such as buy a $1,000 Chrome Hearts hoodie or be invited to Braden’s party even though Braden seems like the type who will finish high school in rehab.
But part of being a parent is sometimes saying, You know what? That’s stupid and tacky and it sounds terrible. But yes, we can do it.
A Waymo is a driverless car that you can order with an app, like an Uber, and roughly as expensive. It’s a start-up funded by Alphabet, the parent company of Google. As of now, they’ve only launched in three cities: San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, where we live.
A big part of the reason my son wanted to ride in one is because they drive by our house in West L.A. all the time. Our street is on some kind of Waymo training route. And they’re hard to miss: Big, white Jaguar S.U.V.’s outfitted with what look like five Ring cameras, a couple of GoPros, submarine sonar, and a gyroscope. They make me think of Hvaldimir, that beluga whale that the Russians supposedly strapped spy gear onto so they could surveil enemy navies.
So one Sunday, we stood in front of the Broad museum and waited expectantly. Eventually, a little beluga whale of an S.U.V. pulled up all on its own. It looked cute and hopeful and a little unsure of itself, like a teenager in a tuxedo showing up without his parents to pick up a prom date. I pressed a button on my app, and the door opened. Inside, it was clean and peaceful. On the screen you could control the music or contact someone at a call center, presumably if the car lost its mind and you thought you were going to die in a fiery crash.
Judging from the early press out of San Francisco, people there see Waymo through a tech lens. The Bay Area loves its product testing. It’s a culture of believers, ready to be optimistic about just about anything that promises to change the fabric of society. These are the people who actually bought into the idea of Soylent. People who would line up to beta test the human pods in The Matrix and then make a TikTok about it: The ultimate V.R. headset! Game changer! Here’s why plugging into the simulation and becoming a human battery for our robot overlords is a signal for the coming age of Utopia! Link in bio.
It looked cute and hopeful and a little unsure of itself, like a teenager in a tuxedo showing up without his parents to pick up a prom date.
But in Los Angeles, we are interested in cars—it’s why my son knows the names of every model of Lamborghini—and getting attention. And with Waymo, you get both.
When we got into ours, at the Broad, a crowd of people manifested and started taking pictures, just holding up their phones and videoing or taking selfies with the empty driver’s seat. I don’t blame them. When we see a Waymo in the wild, we always try to catch it and see if there’s someone driving, which is probably a dumb, unsafe thing to do on the highway.
The ride commenced, and we pulled away. The trip to our house, usually about 20 minutes, would take nearly an hour since Waymo decided against using the highway. It was slow, deliberate, immensely quiet. The music was ambient. The steering wheel moved itself like the wheel on an amusement-park car that’s driven on rails.
I want to tell you that I hated it. Part of Waymo’s promise is that you can be driven somewhere and never have to navigate any awkwardness with the stranger who’s driving you. Yay! More isolation. Yet another business built on what seems like the chief insight of any product designer who wants their company to scale, whether it’s a snack food or a search engine: People, if given the choice, will choose whatever is marginally less challenging or uncomfortable. Even if we just read an article about how it’s bad for us.
But, I’m sorry to say, it was awesome.
I spend so much of my life in a car crisscrossing Los Angeles, and all that time is characterized by, I realize now, low-level stress. Trying to shave a few minutes off my E.T.A. Being livid that some idiot in a Bentley S.U.V. would not let me cross Olympic. Even in an Uber, I end up “shadow driving.”
But all that angst was just … removed. The idea that I had any power to make any decision was erased. You know what it was like? Being in business class on a European train, where everyone has given over their safety to some industrialized process. My son and I simply hung out. Looked out the windows. Did nothing.
As soon as it was over, we started telling everyone about it. Maybe that’s really the point of Waymo—now my son had something to put in his Snapchat Story. Because, lest we forget, the other Silicon Valley insight is that FOMO is just as powerful as the reluctance to leave our own homes. At least until the novelty of the driverless taxi wears off. And we will never even remember a time when we were driven to the airport by a guy in fingerless gloves who listened to Andrea Bocelli at full volume.
Devin Friedman is a Los Angeles–based writer