We’re Learning to Live with Waymos. It’s Going Weird
The wheel turns: when one of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles is in motion, its steering wheel moves, too—twitching out the car’s maneuvers from the usual position, facing the front-left seat. Generally, on American roads, this is known as the driver’s seat. In a Waymo, such a designation is arbitrary. The Waymo Driver, as the company calls its autonomous-driving system—a force guided by sensors, cameras, custom maps, and machine learning—is all around. No one is allowed to sit in that front-left seat.
Before I’d ridden in a Waymo, I had wondered about the wheel. What was it doing up there? One answer, a boring one, is as follows: it is fulfilling a legal mandate. Existing safety standards assume that cars have steering wheels, and, because Waymo’s vehicles are regulated as cars, so do they. Besides, the company has spent much of its decade-long existence retrofitting normal cars with self-driving technology; the wheel is largely a vestigial inheritance.
But perhaps it’s more than that. “We were very curious about whether people would react positively or negatively to the fact that the wheel turned,” Megan Neese, Waymo’s “Head of Insights,” told me recently. We were sitting in her employer’s San Francisco offices. Neese has been at the company since 2019, when it began offering fully driverless rides to the public; she was tasked with gauging passenger reactions. It was not hard to see how a wheel steering on its own might look spooky—the suggestion of a ghost in the machine. Yet, to Neese’s surprise, riders reported that it reassured them. It seemed to convey that the car’s actions were “recognizable; they’re relatable; they’re continuing to happen.” (Similarly, when a Waymo’s windshield wipers wipe, it’s mostly for you. The Driver doesn’t need them.)
The wheel thrills you, it unnerves you, it gives you a vague feeling that you could grab it if you really wanted to. It makes the car seem both familiar and magical—the Jetsonian sweet spot for a product whose makers would like to take over the world. And, at the moment, that is what Waymo is trying to do.
Waymo has a fleet of more than four thousand cars in fifteen cities across the U.S. In San Francisco, the company recently surpassed Lyft in market share. More than thirteen hundred Waymos whir and glide in the region, the lidar sensors that spin in hat-like domes atop their roofs giving them an air of busy importance. The company has set its sights on D.C., New York, London, Tokyo. Its intended message is clear: Waymo is coming.
Now humans are learning to live alongside the machines. Waymos, like data centers, provide a ready vessel for strong reactions to the broad sweep of technological change. The benefits and risks of A.I. can seem hazy, but cars are big and solid, and Americans love them. “It might be some custom L.L.M. that causes someone to lose their job,” Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies autonomous driving, told me. “But they’re never going to see that. They’re going to see the car going down the street without anybody in it.” When a small team of Google engineers first began tinkering with self-driving Priuses, an Obama-era optimism about technology’s promise still prevailed. The product of their work arrives at a moment when its appeal is not quite as apparent as it might once have been.
If autonomous driving is the future, it’s a future you can visit in San Francisco. This summer, I rode to the company’s downtown offices in a Waymo Ojai—a puffy periwinkle van that made me think of a marshmallow Peep. I was in the belly of the Peep. I was accompanied by a young spokesperson named Sandy Karp. She told me that she’d become interested in A.V.s as a student; she’d been impressed with Tesla’s comms strategy, which seemed to keep people enamored with its cars even when its cars kept catching fire.
At the offices, Karp steered me briskly past open-plan tables and upholstered nooks, past signage announcing corporate fun. In the cafeteria, we passed a loitering robot approximately the size and shape of a podium, with a central compartment for trays and bins. “READY TO BUS,” a digital ticker around its top read. I yelped with surprise when I first saw it: I knew that guy!
There is a near-identical robot to be found at Jalsa, an Indian restaurant in my Brooklyn neighborhood, where its presence inspires the same frisson of novelty as a hands-off steering wheel. Jalsa has excellent food, leisurely service, and a robot waiter of unclear utility. Slowly, always slowly, and always in the company of a human server, the robot transports dishes to diners’ tables, where the human server distributes them. Still, a hush falls over the dining room when it enters, and it can delight a small child by singing “Happy Birthday,” regardless of whether it is anyone’s birthday. Wow, one can’t help thinking. A robot. Here it is. But why?
In June, Waymo unveiled its first national campaign, called “Because.” The ad opens with the red flash of emergency lights. “Car crashes injure over a million of us every year,” a voice-over explains. “Because we’re human.”
There are many things humans do that are difficult to imagine any machine improving upon, but driving is not one of them. Human drivers possess abundant and obvious shortcomings. The ad touts “a driver that never blinks, never gets tired or angry or has a few too many.” Waymo’s cars are “ten times safer” than those with human drivers, the ad declares—a crisp figure that recurs throughout company materials. A decade ago, Elon Musk told reporters that, if their skepticism turned the public against autonomous vehicles, they would be “killing people.” Waymo offers a more measured version of the same general argument: cars don’t kill people; people kill people.
As a response to “Why?,” “Because” is an answer that carries a whiff of impatience. Just trust us; you wouldn’t understand. The text of the “Because” ad is Safety; the subtext is We don’t actually hate humans—“wonderful, complex humans,” as the voice-over puts it, faintly passive-aggressive or else just patronizing. “Not because humans aren’t enough, but because they’re everything.”
The initial answer to the question of why we might build robot cars was “For a million dollars.” In 2004, the Pentagon hosted a contest that promised a cash prize to the winner of a driverless race through the desert. None of the entrants even finished that race, but, a year later, five vehicles completed a follow-up. Google hired the Stanford professor behind the winning team, a German machine-learning expert named Sebastian Thrun, and a Berkeley grad student named Anthony Levandowski. Relentlessly enterprising and six feet seven, a literally oversized character, Levandowski had entered an autonomous motorcycle, Ghost Rider, which started the course and promptly fell over. He’d neglected to turn on the program that kept it upright. Ghost Rider wound up in the Smithsonian’s collection anyway, a monument to grand ambition foiled by user error.
In 2009, Google’s new Project Chauffeur set about reconfiguring a fleet of Priuses that Levandowski had bought at a San Jose Toyota dealership. The project retained a spirit of playful competition. The team structured their efforts around mastering ten difficult routes on California’s roads, toasting their triumph with a bottle of cheap champagne that they signed and saved. They sent their first solo passenger on an autonomous trip through Austin in 2015, along a route painstakingly calibrated to be manageable but not too boring. “I knew where, from a certain park, squirrels were likely to jump out,” Chris Ludwick, a product manager on the team, told me. In 2016, the project, which is still largely owned by Google’s parent company, was renamed Waymo.
By this time, a new industry had arisen. Ridesharing provided a business model for autonomous cars, and rideshare companies were eager to eliminate the expense of human drivers. Levandowski defected to Uber, allegedly taking fourteen thousand confidential design files with him. (In 2020, he was convicted of stealing trade secrets; he was later pardoned by Donald Trump.) Tesla and Uber had embraced a Wild West image; Waymo was doing its autonomous driving in hybrid Chrysler minivans. Arizona became the first real A.V. sandbox and, in 2018, the site of the first A.V. pedestrian death, when an Uber test vehicle struck a woman crossing the road at night. The safety driver, it later emerged, was watching “The Voice” at the time of the crash.
Waymo’s next challenge is to bring the public on board—which it sees as a matter of communicating its benevolent intentions. “We have to make sure that people get a baseline education,” Justin Kintz, who runs public policy, told me. In the places where Waymo now operates, it is possible to see an unlikely dream becoming a human reality, in all its wonderful complexity.
Elliot Slade is thirty-one and shaggily handsome, with tattoos of birds and bunnies on his forearms. He works for a company trying to build A.I. data centers in space. One night this past May, he and his fiancée attended Forbes’s Innovator 250 gala, in Menlo Park—a work event. When the Innovators finished innovating, around ten, Slade considered how to get home. “Why don’t we try a Waymo?” he suggested.
In San Francisco, Waymos have become an urban fixture. One tech executive in her thirties told me that she’d once shocked a roomful of sexually adventurous partygoers by saying that she’d given her husband a blow job under a coat in the back seat of a Waymo. “But you could lose your Waymo account!” she remembers them responding. (“I did read the terms and conditions after,” she told me.)
The city has seen its share of self-driving hassles—as when a power outage in December, 2025, took out traffic lights across the city, and hundreds of confused Waymos stalled in the streets. Still, Slade liked them. “I can be a tech optimist,” he told me. Sometimes he took one when he wanted to do karaoke on the go. “You can sing your heart out without annoying anyone,” he said. (The vehicles let riders link their Spotify accounts, a feature that nearly every Waymo user I spoke to mentioned.) Soon enough, Slade and his fiancée were singing in comfort, approaching the 101 on-ramp.
Waymo began offering freeway service only recently, in late 2025, and, as Slade’s car reached the top of the ramp, he was conscious of entering unknown terrain. Traffic was at a standstill. A right-hand lane was closed, and everyone was merging left. The Waymo seemed to know that something unusual was happening: a notification appeared on a touch screen in the back. “Remote specialists are monitoring this issue,” it read. “The safest place for you is in the car.”
Slade was tentatively game. “We’re, like, ‘O.K., this is kind of interesting?’ ” he recalled. He began filming the ride on his phone. After the car tried to merge, it veered to the right, as if to pull onto the shoulder. What it found there was a lane closed off for roadwork. Slade’s car evidently regarded this empty lane as a place of untrammelled freedom: just a few cones stood between a Waymo and the open road. “It went through the cones,” Slade said, “then instantly sped up to highway speeds.”
Ahead was a construction site; the Waymo galloped toward it. Slade pushed a button to call support and was told that an agent would be with him shortly. Sirens are audible in his video, as police chase the bolting Waymo, which deftly navigates around trucks, lights, and workers, and over broken pavement. Slade wondered whether he could grab the wheel, then remembered reading somewhere that it wouldn’t work. (This is correct: touch the wheel and the car will pull over; keep trying and it may call support, but it won’t let you steer.) Slade was unsure what else to do. No agent had yet come on the line.
Eventually, the car exited the highway and pulled off into the nocturnal quiet of a random peninsula neighborhood. Once the Waymo was at rest, an agent picked up. “That looked like a stressful experience,” Slade remembers her saying. “Would you like to continue the ride?” “No,” he said. They would not. Nor would they like to remain in the car while awaiting their Uber home. They would like to get out, immediately.
By the next morning, Slade had posted his footage on X. Waymo paused freeway service and issued a software recall. Waymo offered Slade three forty-dollar ride credits. Otherwise, he has not heard from the company.
Slade was physically unharmed. The experience was not, therefore, anything that would dent Waymo’s “ten times safer” stat. The figure refers to a ninety-two-per-cent reduction in crashes causing “serious injury or worse.” This is a remarkable achievement, and although outside evidence is limited, researchers generally view it as promising.
Yet crash statistics alone fail to capture the range of incidents that might freak somebody out. On the Fourth of July, Waymos in San Francisco drove over fireworks being set off in the street. One car caught fire; another just kept driving until its unnerved passengers requested to end the ride. This spring in Atlanta and San Antonio, Waymos drove into rising floodwaters and then stopped. A videographer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recorded water lapping outside her stalled car. “WHAT?” she says, after an automated voice brightly informs her that roadside assistance is fifty-four minutes away.
Human drivers make human mistakes, and robot drivers make robot ones. Sometimes the robot mistake is a benign oddity—the spatial equivalent of a chatbot’s overfondness for em dashes and “delving.” Earlier this year, in certain Atlanta cul-de-sacs, dozens of empty Waymos began to congregate: puzzling, not what anyone really wants, but not dangerous. A more troubling case might be Waymos’ tendency to run the stop signs that extend from the sides of school buses while children board and disembark. In an Austin school district where buses are equipped with cameras, Waymos were recorded illegally passing them more than twenty times in the past school year—a problem that persisted even after the company tried to fix it. Thus far, the bus behavior lies beyond the bounds of Waymo’s safety metrics. “If a Waymo were to hypothetically run a school-bus stop sign tomorrow and kill three kids,” Bryant Walker Smith, the legal expert, told me, “none of the safety data they’ve collected would be relevant.”
The footage that Slade recorded does a poor job of showing exactly what happened, because mostly it shows his lap. (“I didn’t want my last fucking bit of life with my fiancée to be, like, me on the phone,” he said.) But it does show the song Spotify was playing at the time: “Coyote,” a work of sunny car-ad indie by a band called Mt. Joy. The song begins, “Come on, get on the bus, there’s room for all of us,” and continues, “Get on this bus, it’s gonna take your trust.”
“I just got a Waymo ad urging me to bring Waymo to my city,” my husband remarked recently, scrolling through Instagram. “I feel like that’s not really my call,” he said, after a pause. “Maybe they’re hoping they’ll get Zohran?”
Waymo is now attempting the leap from regional curiosity to American infrastructure. In February, the company announced a new valuation of a hundred and twenty-six billion dollars. That kind of money demands expansion, but the familiar Silicon Valley strategy of moving fast and breaking things is not an option when the things in question are cars. Instead, Waymo has undertaken a somewhat manic effort to bring the public around. It’s planning a Super Bowl ad; it’s sponsoring a West Indian Day parade float; it’s sending a Waymo to a conference full of urbanists who hate Waymos.
In Washington, D.C., the city council is considering a bill to permit autonomous taxis. “They’ve hired every lobbyist in D.C.,” Charles Allen, the councilman who wrote the bill, told me. Last year, Waymo took Allen out for a ride—autonomously driven, but with a test driver behind the wheel. At a tricky intersection, the car waited through one full light cycle and most of a second before attempting a left turn. When the Waymo finally made its move, Allen looked at the front seat and saw the test driver’s hands on the steering wheel. “I said to the driver, ‘Excuse me, sir, but did you make that turn or did the car?’ ” Allen recalled. “He kind of sheepishly was, like, ‘That was me.’ ”
D.C. has the federal government, but New York is New York. “You must make it here to make it anywhere,” Meera Joshi, who previously ran the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission, told me. Waymo spent nearly a year testing cars in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but its permits expired in early 2026. Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor, once went on a hunger strike with the city’s taxi-drivers over debt relief, and has been vague about whether he supports renewing the company’s permits. Waymos can still be glimpsed zipping through the city. They remain, waiting—albeit with human drivers behind the wheel.
Waymo sells its service as a remedy for prejudice (because robot drivers won’t discriminate against Black people) and for transit deserts (a claim Uber and Lyft also used to make). People with mobility aids and service animals report that rideshare drivers often decline to pick them up, a practice that’s the subject of a Department of Justice suit against Uber. A Waymo, however, will not balk at a passenger’s guide dog. Lana Nieves, the executive director of the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco, is a member of the Waymo Accessibility Network. She has a degenerative bone disease, and, on days when she feels up to lifting her walker into the trunk, she likes to ride in the front seat of a Waymo and sing along to Carly Simon.
Still, the accessibility argument strains a bit. Wheelchair users continue to require human drivers when travelling alone. (Users can request a wheelchair-accessible, human-driven car through Waymo’s app, though this raises the question of why they’d seek out Waymo’s app in the first place.) Nieves’s organization has lent Waymo its credibility, and Waymo has, in turn, donated money for the group’s programming. “I’ve had colleagues say, ‘Oh, they bought you,’ ” Nieves told me. “I would be in Fiji on vacation if I were that person. I wouldn’t do it for less than that. Not that I would ever do it at all.”
A startling percentage of the American landscape is built for people driving cars. Cars that drive on their own will require new infrastructure. In June, I visited a Waymo maintenance depot on Toland Street, in San Francisco. Its interior, appropriately, looked like an auto-body shop crossed with a startup office; there were phone-booth pods, laptops on a table, and rows of disemboweled cars. Outside, Waymos puttered around a parking lot. Two hundred cars were on site, variously charging, awaiting their turns to charge, and enjoying the ministrations of human maintenance workers. The cars need to charge for about fifty minutes every six to eight hours—a cycle under way twenty-four hours a day, because a Waymo does not sleep at night.
A manager named Brandon Cain and I wandered the depot, interlopers among the Waymos, which yielded to us tirelessly. “I have to check myself,” Cain told me. “I will walk around the depot just like this”—he looked down, like someone not surrounded by two hundred cars—“because I know that I’m safe.” It can be a hard habit to break when walking through an ordinary parking lot. A car that had just finished charging approached, and I jumped experimentally in front of it; the Waymo stopped. I stepped aside, and the car started to proceed. I jumped again. I felt heady, powerful, and kind of like a jerk. I apologized to Cain, because I couldn’t apologize to the car.
In 2024, Waymo established two charging stations in Santa Monica. Previously, the lots had been used by a Ford dealership, and if the new tenant appeared similar on paper it was not in practice. Waymos came and went at all hours, bringing lights, noise, and traffic past a block of modest apartments.
Frustration began to bubble among the neighbors. A software engineer named Dylan Moore recorded hundreds of Waymos a day driving down his alley. Some residents wrote letters to the city. Another, a middle-aged lawyer who asked to be identified only as Stacker One, realized that there was something else he could do. On a February night, he stepped into the path of an incoming Waymo.
Later, he memorialized this moment by asking Google Gemini to write an ode to himself called “The Dao Te Stacker.” “His feet were bare upon the asphalt,” it reads. “He did not raise his hands in anger. He merely stepped into the center of the lane and stood still.” A few short feet away from him, the car stopped, and others behind it did the same. A stack of Waymos: he had stacked them. “Stacker One looked down the line of silent, waiting cars. He had not used force, yet the entire fleet had been mastered by his presence.”
He started doing this often. He could be seen wearing a Whole Foods bag with eyeholes on his head, or inflating Minion holiday decorations to block the cars’ path. A few neighbors joined him. Police began showing up, flummoxed in the face of an irate attorney, indifferent third-party technicians, and insensate machines. Waymo sought a restraining order against Stacker One; the City of Santa Monica sued Waymo; Waymo sued Santa Monica. As of now, the Waymos still roam the alley. “I assure you, I’m not deranged,” Stacker One told me. His circumstances, though, were deranging.
It was a cool June day in San Francisco when I summoned a Waymo to take me to a friend’s home in Bernal Heights. The sound system on board played spa-like ambient tones as I settled myself. The interior was serene, aside from an insistent chiming reminder to buckle my seat belt and an onscreen threat to call support if I did not comply. Near City Hall, I looked out the window and saw a young man flipping me off—or flipping the Waymo off, or flipping both of us off, together. I had the brief and nonsensical impulse to explain myself—it’s for work!—but I was frozen.
Heckling has been a hazard of Waymo use in San Francisco. My friend told me that there were bars in the city she’d hesitate to send me to if I were pulling up in a Waymo. Later, she texted me photos of a flyer from her neighborhood. It concerned the respective vibes of two nearby streets, and read in part:
The next morning, I met Elliot Slade at a coffee shop on Valencia that he’d suggested. He said that he had once been yelled at while getting out of a Waymo. Online, Waymo enthusiasts trade stories of getting egged. “There’s a lot of controversy behind Waymo in the city,” Slade told me. “Because of the KitKat incident.” It was not immediately clear to me what he was talking about. I’d forgotten a story that I’d heard a while back about a cat.
Last October, a Waymo ran over and killed KitKat, beloved longtime denizen of Randa’s Market, a liquor store. KitKat’s gruesome death made him a martyr; in the aftermath, a local politician staged a “Justice for KitKat” rally. The incident inspired multiple memorial meme coins, forensic scrutiny of video footage, and bitter anti-Waymo sentiment.
Slade and I walked over to Randa’s, just around the corner. At one time, according to SFGate, the offerings at a KitKat shrine outside Randa’s included two cans of Fancy Feast and a mini bottle of Fernet-Branca. Now only a few scraps remained, and the Waymos passed by, oblivious. A clerk inside said that his boss, KitKat’s owner, was tired of talking about the whole thing. A yellow-eyed black cat glared at me from behind the counter. “BEWARE OF CAT,” a sign next to the register read. “SHADOW WILL BITE AND/OR SHANK YOU.”
Back on Valencia, Slade pointed out a restaurant called Yummy Pizza. “It’s all A.I.,” he said, peering in the darkened windows at the menu. The walls around the counter were covered in images that nearly glowed with unreality: pizza slices poised in midair, milkshakes turbulent with syrup, a burger lounging before what seemed to be a fireplace. The motto “We Have the Right Taste” appeared several times. Slade could see why so many people were disturbed by what was being sold to them as progress. “There’s such a disconnect from the people building the technology to the general public,” he said. Slop spawns, and Waymo’s artificially intelligent cars hum into view like two-ton rolling Rorschach tests.
Slade chose his words carefully as we discussed KitKat’s death. He refrained from saying what others have and I will now, which is that human drivers kill plenty of cats. What galls, perhaps, is less the accident itself than the absence of a person stepping out from behind the wheel, having a human experience of horror and regret. “We send our deepest sympathies,” the company said in a statement at the time. The void of individual culpability is by design. Agency has come a little bit unmoored.
One night this spring, a San Francisco man named Sherman Watson called a Waymo after a late dinner out with friends. Watson runs a concierge business, sourcing high-end goods and services for clients, and Waymo was among the luxuries he personally enjoyed: being able to adjust the air-conditioning, seeing his initials appear on the lidar dome. “You don’t have to talk to anybody,” he said. “You don’t have to smell someone’s food.” His car was at a stoplight when a man outside grabbed the bumper and began rocking it up and down. The Waymo retreated a few feet. A second man appeared.
The pair seemed prepared and methodical—not sloppy carousers but people with a plan. They had something heavy and hard, like a pipe, and began hitting the windshield. One had what looked like a large block of foam, which he used to climb onto the car’s roof. He seemed to be going for its lidar hat.
A support agent came on the car’s speakers, and Watson asked to get the car moving. The agent told him that this was impossible: the vehicle was “obstructed.” The windshield had cracked in spiderwebs, and one of the men was striking a window. Watson wondered if they’d succeed in breaking the glass. “When you are in a Waymo, you’re powerless,” he told me. “You can’t honk the horn, you can’t flash the lights, you can’t move the car. You’re stuck.” The police arrived about a half hour later, by which time the men had left. In a report filed on the incident, Watson is listed as a witness, and Waymo as the victim.
Waymo promises its riders two things that, while related, are distinct: automation and driverlessness. Automation is the source of the traffic-safety potential that the company touts. Driverlessness, though, is the quality that users praise first, almost without exception. They want to put on their own music and control their own temperature; they don’t want to make conversation. Sometimes this can feel considerate. One woman told me that she’d taken a Waymo to urgent care for a strep test—better not to infect a driver, she thought. Other times, as Watson noted, the instinct can feel “selfish,” a desire not to deal with other human beings.
Promoting driverlessness as such is a delicate business. Doing so risks bolstering an impression that, as one Atlantic headline about Waymo put it, “People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions.” The fantasy of perfectly solitary convenience—DoorDashing a meal for one and binging Netflix alone on the couch—has been a reliable bet in Silicon Valley. Waymo has experimented with spinning this, too, as virtuous. Recently, The Atlantic published a piece of sponcon from Waymo that, like the first article, described a service free from interactions with another person. The headline, in this case, was “Why Autonomous Vehicles Are a Lifeline for Neurodiverse Adults.”
But, as is often the case, the illusion of self-sufficiency depends on other people. Waymo has approximately seventy “remote assistance” agents on duty at any given time, working at call centers in the U.S. and the Philippines, who advise the Waymo Driver on confusing situations. (The other reason that Waymos still have steering wheels and windshield wipers is that humans must retrieve them when they seriously malfunction.) The company also has “rider support” agents, who respond to customer requests. In a podcast interview with the tech journalist Junko Yoshida last year, a man who’d worked for a contractor fielding rider questions described his frustration with the operation’s “lack of attention or rigor.” He recalled seeing gathered colleagues laughing, as if watching something wild on YouTube, while an unbuckled small child riding alone was “trying to play with things” in a Waymo’s front seat. (Waymo said that it had no record of such an incident and noted that the man had left the contractor more than two years before the interview.) I spoke to a different former contractor employee who said that one of his tasks had been to teach support agents “the difference between empathy versus sympathy.” In practice, what this meant was that they should “refrain from saying ‘I’m sorry,’ ” he told me. “It could imply admission of guilt.”
The lack of a driver can have unexpected consequences. Say someone is out drinking and prudently summons a Waymo: so far, so safe. But suppose, as sometimes happens, he falls asleep in transit. When he fails to exit upon arrival, a Waymo agent will attempt to rouse him—but, if he snoozes on, the agent will need to call 911, and ambulances and fire trucks will be dispatched. According to Bloomberg, San Francisco saw two hundred and fifty such incidents last year. It’s good that our hypothetical passenger wasn’t driving. Still, his evening seems like a less than unalloyed triumph for public safety.
Many women have welcomed the absence of a driver, and with reason. Uber and Lyft have each faced thousands of lawsuits alleging sexual assault by drivers, and even passengers who don’t experience violence deal with quotidian discomforts: unwanted innuendo, the dangers of giving a male stranger their whereabouts. After all, as the comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak have noted, a rideshare driver is “just a guy in his car.”
A tech worker I spoke to named Hannah told me that she was vigilant about such hazards. When ordering an Uber, for example, she’d use a pickup point a short distance from her home. In transportation, as in dating, “you’re constantly mitigating risk,” she said. Earlier this year, when she began talking to a guy on Raya, she combed his socials, saw that they had a previous employer in common, and spent a while chatting with him before making plans for an afternoon date. After a few drinks, he suggested heading to a bar in another neighborhood, and called a Waymo. A Waymo was more expensive than a normal car—a little bit of a treat. This is a green flag, Hannah recalled thinking.
Once in the car, his manner abruptly changed. Suddenly, he was kissing her hard, and putting her hand on his crotch. He grabbed her by the throat and began jamming a finger into her mouth. She pulled her head away and tried pointing out the car’s many interior cameras. He grabbed her throat again, in a manner that made her feel “that he was capable of violence.” She remembers retreating into a “self-preservation mode” as he groped her breasts and reached inside her pants. When they arrived at the bar, she faked an emergency call from a neighbor and left immediately. “I definitely think he intentionally chose a driverless car so he could attack me,” she said.
A driverless car is a new quasi-private space, with uses (and connotations) not yet established. Like an opera box or an elevator, it might furnish comfort, freedom, danger, or some combination thereof. But although the technology is new, the fallacies it reinforces are not. The temptation to imagine strangers as the chief source of sexual menace is as old as alleys.
Hannah wasn’t interested in alerting Waymo about her experience, she told me. Even if the company still had footage of what had happened, she was appalled by the idea of anyone watching it. She just wanted other women to be careful. In the months since, she’s heard about quiet ways to attract the attention of remote support—pulling a door handle, unbuckling a seat belt. We are cruising fast toward the autonomous future, fast enough that the future’s problems seem to come out of nowhere.
During the century or so in which cars have overtaken our streets, they have given us a vocabulary of road-tested metaphors—language that we turn to especially when discussing choice and agency. We look under the hood; we kick the tires. We check our blind spots. We shift gears and get in the fast lane; we keep the pedal to the metal, or else we pump the brakes. We see what happens when the rubber meets the road. Above all, when we take control, we take the wheel. Drivers are the protagonists of American fantasies. The prospect of an unseen power intervening to relieve them (see “Jesus, Take the Wheel”) can be both liberating and disconcerting.
Realizing the grandest version of Waymo’s potential could involve profound changes to American culture. There’s an argument for autonomous vehicles that’s essentially an argument against cars, or at least against private car ownership. Perfectly efficient and law-abiding robot fleets could work together in a transit utopia where every pedestrian is safe and the speed limit is always obeyed, a paradise no one has to pave for a parking lot, because the parking lots are someplace far away. Or, then again, we could all just wind up with our own personal robot chauffeurs. “I would love to be able to say to an autonomous car, ‘Hey, let’s go to L.A. for a few days,’ ” Lana Nieves, the Waymo Accessibility Network member, told me. “And stop along the way wherever I want, to get a burger or just look at the view.” Driving oneself would become an expensively anachronistic hobby, like horseback riding—car boys a futuristic answer to horse girls.
I did most of my driving in the Bay Area, when I was in high school. After college, I moved to New York, which is a wonderful place not to drive, so I don’t. Visiting California this summer, I hoped to take a Waymo along my old route to school. The cars were still banned from the freeway, so I’d have to do it on surface roads—but, then, I’d done that, too, back when I myself was a driver not quite ready for highways. When the Waymo picked me up, I didn’t know what music to put on. All the appropriate soundtracks were lost to bygone iPods.
I could remember the wild, megalomaniacal joy of zooming through the world, doing whatever you want. It felt like starring as yourself in a movie about your life. I could also remember the dumb things I did behind the wheel. Like French homework: I did French homework, while driving. I was extremely responsible and rule-abiding and nonetheless an idiot.
I remember crashing my Honda Civic one night, on Alma Street. I’d been driving home late, short on sleep, heard my phone, and reached for it—exactly the flavor of misadventure that Waymo promises to prevent. My car drifted from its lane. Passing the spot now, I recalled how it had felt when the tires met the curb that night: the sensation of claws at my wheels, accompanied by a shocking recognition that things really could go wrong. The car ended up on its side after skidding back into the road. It was totalled; I was unhurt. The ground was covered in glass, and I remember climbing through the rear window and realizing that I was barefoot—I’d taken my shoes, heels, off to drive.
The Civic, before it was smashed and ruined, had been a private world, an extension of myself. One of the strange things about riding in a Waymo is spending time in a car that belongs to no one. In the age of driving, cars have been our homes and our exoskeletons, fortresslike rooms of one’s own, embodying an intoxicating combination of danger and safety. In no context is the notion of a “death drive” more apt than on American roads. Arguing against an alternative to driving is like arguing against choosing a vape over Marlboro Reds: it makes no sense and all the sense in the world.
My accident was not what the safety statistics call a serious-injury crash. But it was enough to make me realize that I did not, in fact, enjoy driving—not the actual task. What I wanted was to be a passenger who is somehow in charge, which is exactly what Waymo offers. Of course, this comes with a loss of autonomy. “Taking away the car keys” has become a vivid shorthand for acknowledging diminished capacities. A lot depends on who’s asking us to hand the keys over, and whether we trust them.
Teens, for their part, have always been able to see the appeal of the back seat. (One mother in the Bay Area told me that she feels safer sending her children out in a Waymo than in an Uber, although she’s heard that kids in San Francisco “hang out in the back seat and just make out.”) Arizona has been, once again, at the forefront of autonomous driving: in 2025, it became the first state to allow teens to have their own Waymo accounts.
I asked an Arizona teen named Mikaylee, a figure skater with a tight ponytail, whether she or her parents ever felt concerned about reports of Waymo incidents. I was thinking about the floodwaters and the freeway troubles, but Mikaylee wasn’t, evidently. “I don’t think we’re too worried,” she told me. “Almost just about all the incidents in the past year and a half-ish have not been caused by the Waymo. It’s been caused by somebody else—something else getting in the way or not following road rules, and then crashing into the Waymo. The Waymo doesn’t crash into them.”
The blithe assurance of blamelessness is a large part of Waymo’s promise to the rider: that open-road feeling of freedom and power, without the responsibility. (The historian Peter Norton, who studies American car culture, has described autonomous vehicles as de-responsibilizing machines.) At present, the autonomous vehicle is an adolescent product in more ways than one. So climb in, crank up your music, and don’t talk to anybody if you don’t feel like it. Nothing very bad is going to happen to you—not to you—but if it does it will be an aberration, and certainly not your fault. You know best, and nothing can hurt you, and nothing is your fault.
Mikaylee told me that she scarcely remembered a time without Waymo. Her mother, who works in aerospace, has epilepsy, which prevents her from driving, and she was an early Waymo tester. Mikaylee had been tagging along since she was in a booster seat. She has lived much of her life in a world that the rest of us will soon inhabit. Getting her own Waymo account was as ready-made a milestone as learning to drive, which she thinks that she’ll do eventually, but sees no need for yet. The night before our conversation, she and a friend had taken a Waymo home from the mall. It was her friend’s first ride. “They thought it was so awesome,” Mikaylee told me. “When we got out, they were, like, ‘Bye, Waymo, I love you.’ ” ♦