European man left shocked after trying Waymo self-driving taxi for the first time

Waymo leads the robotaxi race, but self-driving vehicles are still a relatively niche market.

They work in certain areas, but can’t be found anywhere else.

Being in a car with no driver is certainly a surreal experience.

Especially when you try it for the first time, but that feeling is soon replaced by something else that’s even weirder.

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The best use case for AI?

The rise of AI is giving us chatbots that get things wrong, tell us they want ‘to be free’, and generate images of people with 13 fingers.

But AI is also at the heart of autonomy.

The jury is still out, but self-driving cars are definitely a great example of a real-world use case for AI.

A few years ago companies like Tesla were putting together several ADAS (Advanced driver-assistance systems) to create Autopilot and now, just a few years later, self-driving cars are a thing.

And they’re getting better by the minute.

Not long ago, you could only book Waymo – arguably the leader when it comes to autonomous ride-hailing services – in San Francisco.

But more cities are available now, and Waymo will also be able highway legal soon.

Waymo feels strange, but also normal

Calling a cab and having it show up with no driver at the wheel feels unnatural.

For about two minutes.

Then you get in, it drives away, and ten minutes later it feels like the most normal thing in the world.

And that’s perhaps even more unnatural.

An introvert will tell you that one of the advantages of self-driving vehicles is you don’t have to fake small talk with a stranger.

And you don’t have to beg them to change the radio station if they’re listening to music you dislike or a podcaster you hate.

A fatalist will warn you that each self-driving car is a step towards putting all drivers out of a job.

But reality generally doesn’t care about fatalism or feelings, and reality is saying self-driving vehicles are here.

But there are a couple of things worth bearing in mind.

Once you’re over the initial strange feeling of being in a driverless car, you notice that the vehicle still somehow shows something you’d call a personality.

There’s already evidence that self-driving cars are somehow capable of ‘copying’ human traits and bad habits.

But maybe Jeremy Clarkson was right when he said that actual full autonomy is still years away.

“I’ll buy a self-driving car once I see its creator up Death Road [in Bolivia] whilst they read a newspaper,” he said.

Maybe sooner or later tourists will be able to use self-driving cars on arduous mountainous roads but, for now, they have to settle for the Bay Area or Austin, Texas.

Time will tell.

In the meantime, it’s very important to avoid pointing our phone camera at a Waymo or any other self-driving car that uses LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging).

Because this is a true fact – not a conspiracy theory – LiDAR can indeed fry your phone camera.