San Francisco · Google · U.S. · newyorker.com
Learning to live with Waymos
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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.
Key facts
- In 2009, Google’s new Project Chauffeur set about reconfiguring a fleet of Priuses that Levandowski had bought at a San Jose Toyota dealership
- One night this past May, he and his fiancée attended Forbes’s Innovator 250 gala, in Menlo Park—a work event
- READY TO BUS,” a digital ticker around its top read
- 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
Summary
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. Before the reporter would ridden in a Waymo, the reporter had wondered about the wheel. One answer, a boring one, is as follows: it is fulfilling a legal mandate. But perhaps it’s more than that. “We were 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. 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. The wheel thrills you, it unnerves you, it gives you a vague feeling that you could grab it if you wanted to.