Taking a Ride in a Waymo in San Francisco

Waymo is a company owned by Google that is developing self driving taxis for some years now. It currently has driverless cars taking paying passengers in a few cities in the US, including San Francisco, where I spent a week for a conference. Given that I was there, I took advantage of the opportunity and took a ride in one of their robot taxis, and it was quite an impressive experience!

This was not my first time in a robot taxi: back in 2023, on a previous trip to San Francisco, I took advantage of an invite from Cruise, a company that was also developing robot taxis and had some of them available in limited areas of San Francisco, and rode in one of their driverless cars. Since then, unfortunately, Cruise ceased its activities, like other companies that were trying to develop a fully self driving car.

However, Waymo is still going well, and in fact it seems to be way ahead of the competition, which I could figure out by myself when I rode in one of their veicules. The basics are still the same: you need to install the Waymo app in your phone, which works just like an Uber or Lyft app, and then request a ride from where you are to another place in the city limits of San Francisco. I did that and almost immediately a car came and parked in front of me. Through the app, I unlocked the car doors, then pressed a big blue button on the screen that faces the back seat and with that the car started driving through the streets of San Francisco, to drive me from the Fisherman's Wharf to the Golden Gate Park.

Compared to my previous experience with Cruise, the Waymo car drove even more smoothly. Interestingly too, the car showed less hesitation around various obstacles on the way, like moving trucks stopped on the street, bicycles showing up, and some traffic jams that are typical of the San Francisco streets. It's hard to describe, but I could feel that the technology being used by Waymo now is clearly more advanced that what I experienced before, to the point that I can see Waymo cars coming to other cities and becoming less of a novelty.

For now, though, they are certainly a novelty: when I got to the Golden Gate Park (where I took some pictures of Lloyd Lake) I requested another Waymo to go back, and when it arrived a couple of passers by took pictures of me boarding the car. The trip back was just as uneventful, and now I'm looking forward to when Waymo will be available in Seattle.














Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

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