Get in, Loser—We’re Chasing a Waymo Into the FutureNEWS | 18 December 2024WIRED happens to have a bureau in one of Waymo’s first markets, which is both an asset and a challenge: The novelty of being on the road with a bunch of robots has largely worn off for us in San Francisco, too. Even our 90-year old mother, when she took her first Waymo ride, felt instantly comfortable with her new sci-fi chauffeur. “There was no ‘getting used to it,’” she said. (WIRED does not have a singular mother, of course, but this story has many authors. So we’ve decided to write in a collective voice—much as Alphabet likes to say it’s developing not a fleet of autonomous taxis but a single “Waymo driver.”)
8:42 AM “Morning robotaxi chasers!”—The opening words of WIRED’s game-day group chat.
To provide the most useful dispatch from the future, then, we realized we needed a way to make self-driving cars feel strange again. A way to scare up the less superficial lessons of our city’s years with Waymo. We got to thinking.
San Francisco has provided a backdrop for: (A) the dawn of the ubiquitous self-driving taxi; and (B) at least one of the most iconic car chase scenes in movie history. So WIRED decided that the best way to juice some meaning and adrenaline out of the self-driving future would be to tail it in hot pursuit.
Our idea: We’ll pile a few of us into an old-fashioned, human-piloted hired car, then follow a single Waymo robotaxi wherever it goes for a whole workday. We’ll study its movements, its relationship to life on the streets, its whole self-driving gestalt. We’ll interview as many of its passengers as will speak to us, and observe it through the eyes of the kind of human driver it’s designed to replace. We’ll chase it for no fewer than six hours, or until we get into a fiery crash. Whichever comes first.
On the appointed morning, we assemble in a parking lot outside the WIRED offices to meet the driver of our chase car. If you’re blinded by the glare as he approaches, then let us tell you: He looks exactly like Steve McQueen, the race-car-driving star of Bullitt.
OK, fine, he looks nothing like Steve McQueen. If anything he vaguely resembles Jean Reno, the five-o’clock-shadowed French-Moroccan action hero from another movie with a classic car chase, Ronin. Only our guy is friendlier, gabbier, more fond of dad jokes, less ex-military-assassin-ish. His name is Gabe Ets-Hokin.Author: Carlton Reid. Wired Staff. Victoria Turk. David Spiegelhalter. Steven Levy. Meredith Whittaker. Arvind Narayanan. Marah Eakin. Jennifer M. Wood. Zeyi Yang. Source
