If you live or work in San Francisco, chances are you've seen those fancy, new self-driving cars zipping around on city streets.
Listen to the latest episode of "Bay Current" below.
We got a chance to ride in one, taking KCBS Radio's "Bay Current" along for the journey, and put our lives in the hands of a road-tested robot. Our Waymo Jaguar looked like a spaceship, with cameras and spinning sensors on the outside. But on the inside, it's more like a fancy taxi with a robot driver – equipped with a human "autonomous specialist" behind the wheel.
Our trip from San Francisco's Bayview to Potrero Hill was mostly uneventful.
The car obeyed all the traffic rules but it wasn't necessarily smooth.
The vehicle would stop suddenly – sometimes for no apparent reason – and took very wide turns, seemingly to avoid other vehicles and pedestrians. If something did go wrong, customer support gets on the horn immediately to find out what the problem was.
After the roundtrip, we agreed: Self-driving cars are pretty cool, but also a bit anti-climactic. "You're incredibly excited because...a robot is driving you around, but after that we're looking for it to fade into the background," said David Margines, Waymo product manager.
Why were there were so many sudden stops?
"It might have been something that you weren’t able to see," he replied.
The vehicles use lidar, radar and cameras to see and even hear what's going on around them. "We also have microphones on the outside of the vehicles to detect things like police sirens, ambulances," Margines added.
Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, is driving cars about 10,000 miles a week in San Francisco as part of ongoing testing. There have been some crashes but Lety Cavalcante, Waymo's head of ride hailing, said it's almost always the other driver who is at fault.
If you'd like to drive in a car where the car does the driving, Waymo is currently looking for "trusted testers." But there's already a waiting list.
"Be patient," Cavalcante laughed.
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