Do you remember the scene from Malcolm In The Middle where Dewey says, “The future is now, old man”? Well, if you don’t, I’ll have the meme attached to this article. 

It’s incredible that we now live in a world where I can summon a ride from an app on my phone, and a car with no driver shows up to pick me up. All that is possible thanks to a company called Waymo. You might not know what or who Waymo is, so to catch you up, here’s a little explanation of who they are:
Waymo is a tech company. The tech they make revolves around making cars driverless. They made quite a name for themselves because they use a system called LIDAR, which works like a sonar except that LIDAR can see a wall and what’s behind the wall. A technique that Tesla deems inferior to their own, which is to only use cameras.
It doesn’t matter who is and isn’t right about this. All I’ll say is this: from my uneducated perspective, I prefer my self-driving car to be able to see through walls.
There are about 2000 Waymos in circulation today. According to their data, gathered after 100 million fully autonomous miles, a Waymo is anywhere between 75% to 95% safer than a human driver.

Waymo primarily uses the Jaguar I-Pace. A vehicle that shares its styling cues with a toaster. Unfortunately, its looks didn’t stop Waymo from partnering up with Jaguar-Land-Rover. That’s because JLR has had financial issues, so, in hopes of staying in business, they sell a whole lot of cars to Waymo, who, in exchange, gets a nice discount.
The problem with the I-pace, besides its looks and slightly stiff ride, is the headspace of the back seats. Then again, now that I’m thinking about it, it might only be a problem for a select few who, like me, have been blessed with the gift of being over six feet tall. 

All jokes aside, it’s a great system. The most impressive part isn’t that Waymo successfully made a driverless taxi system that works properly in multiple big cities; it’s how easily and how fast you get used to being driven by a robot. So much so that some people get a little too comfortable. I saw a group of friends passing a bottle of wine to one another, drinking right out of the bottle, while being driven to what I can only hope was church. 

Before you get this comfortable, however, you must first be in awe to see the steering wheel move all by itself, the turn signal turns on while no one is sitting in the driver’s seat, it’s simply surreal. To make the whole experience perfect, you’d need to have ‘the future is now, old man’ meme on the centre console screen.
But after a few minutes of that, you realise that it’s not going to get any more exciting. The robot doesn’t have a sense of humour, it’s not going to display memes on the screen, it’s just going to drive you to your destination without making any wild decisions like an Uber driver would. So, when the dust settles, you start looking out the window. You have a conversation with the people you’re with, or you drink wine with them; either way, you do one of the most important things to do during a car ride: you enjoy the trip. 

Max

Ps: Here is a little video of my first 20 seconds in a Waymo.