I rode in a Waymo with no one in the front seat

I’m in San Francisco. I called a Waymo.

The car arrived. White Jaguar I-PACE. Nobody in the front. Nobody in the passenger seat. Just me, climbing into the back of a car with no human inside it.

The steering wheel moved by itself. Like a ghost was driving.

The first five minutes

My body went through a sequence that I’ll try to describe accurately because I think the physical experience of riding in a fully driverless car matters more than the technical analysis.

Minute 1: Tension. My shoulders were up. My hands were gripping my knees. I was hyper-aware of every car around us, every pedestrian, every traffic light. I was doing the driving in my head, checking everything the car should be checking, as if my attention was a backup system.

Minute 2: The car stopped at a red light. Smooth. Appropriate distance from the car ahead. Nothing dramatic. But the normalcy of it was calming. A car stopped at a red light. That’s what cars do. The fact that nobody was pressing the brake was irrelevant to the outcome.

Minute 3: A jaywalker. Walked right in front of us mid-block. The car slowed, not dramatically, just a gentle deceleration that matched what I would have done. It passed the pedestrian with a wide margin. My breathing changed. A notch slower.

Minute 4: I reached for the seatbelt. I was already wearing it. I’d buckled it when I got in. But my hand went to my shoulder anyway, checking. The gesture was pure animal instinct, my body doing its own threat assessment regardless of what my brain thought.

Minute 5: Construction zone. A lane was closed. Orange cones. A flagman waving traffic through. The car slowed, read the situation, merged into the open lane, and proceeded. The flagman didn’t look twice. He’d seen a hundred Waymos this week.

The disconnect

My brain trusted the car by minute 5. The evidence was accumulating. Every decision was reasonable. The driving was cautious, perhaps more cautious than a human, but that felt like a feature, not a bug.

My body didn’t trust the car until minute 20. The grip on my knees released at minute 12. My shoulders dropped at minute 15. At minute 20, I realized I’d been looking at my phone for three minutes without monitoring the road. My body had given up its vigil.

The disconnect between brain trust and body trust is the most interesting thing about the experience. We talk about trust as a single thing. It isn’t. There’s the rational assessment (this car drives well, the statistics are good, the technology works) and there’s the somatic assessment (my nervous system is evaluating threat level based on a million years of evolution that never anticipated this situation).

The brain can be convinced in minutes. The body takes longer. And the body’s opinion is the one that determines whether the experience feels safe or merely survives.

The double-parked truck

Fifteen minutes into the ride, a delivery truck was double-parked in our lane. The car assessed the situation, checked for oncoming traffic, signaled, moved into the opposing lane to pass the truck, and returned to our lane. Smooth. Exactly what I would have done.

But I wouldn’t have checked as carefully. The Waymo safety reports say the car’s sensors cover 360 degrees with no blind spots. I have blind spots. The car’s pass of the double-parked truck was, by any objective measure, safer than my version would have been.

I knew that. My body didn’t care. My hands gripped my knees again as we crossed into the opposing lane. Held them until we were back in our lane. Then released.

After

The Waymo One app rated the ride. I gave it 5 stars. The car pulled away to pick up its next passenger. I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, watching it go.

An empty car, driving itself through San Francisco, picking up strangers, navigating a city designed for human drivers. Doing it well enough that my body, which has survived by being suspicious of everything for my entire life, eventually stopped worrying.

I walked to a coffee shop and sat down and thought about the fact that I’d just been driven somewhere by a machine and the most remarkable thing about it was how unremarkable it felt.

That’s the future’s trick. It arrives and it feels normal. And the normalcy is the revolution.

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