Impressions of Waymo's robotaxis after several rides: amazing tech that quickly feels “normal”, but the car failed to understand a traffic cop's hand signals
I took my first Cruise more than a year ago! https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Pranay Prateek / @pranay01 : My first time riding a driverless car and I must say this is definitely the future. The ride with @Waymo was super smooth, even smoother than a human driver and the points where the car pulled over were not busy. Self driving technology is the future and it is here😎 [video] Alexia Bonatsos / @alexia : SF's hottest club is a Waymo. Ava / @noampomsky : every day I want to look into a waymo engineer's eyes and tell them their work has changed the world for the better Peter Kazanjy / @kazanjy : Waymo coverage to SFO can't come soon enough. [image] Forums: r/SelfDrivingCars : Waymo's self-driving robotaxis are awesome. r/waymo : Waymo's self-driving robotaxis are awesome.
Business InsiderPeter Kafka
Context & Ripple Effects
Waymo’s rider experience had already moved from a limited-service concept toward routine urban transport after California authorized 24/7 driverless operations in San Francisco in the 2023 authorization for round-the-clock service. Earlier rider reporting also showed that performance could vary across trips, including route choices and traffic avoidance in San Francisco ride tests.
This account matters because it captures both sides of commercialization at once: smooth, quickly normalized passenger service and a failure at a human-directed traffic-control moment. It is a useful reminder that autonomous driving is judged on rare exceptions as well as ordinary miles.
First-order effects
For riders, a smooth trip can make a driverless ride feel ordinary quickly, strengthening the practical case for using Waymo as transportation rather than as a novelty.
The missed traffic-officer signals expose an operational gap in situations where roadway authority is communicated through gestures rather than standard traffic controls.
Second-order effects
Waymo and other robotaxi operators face pressure to improve the machine-perception and decision stack for police-directed traffic, construction, and other nonstandard road interactions.
Public confidence and local acceptance may become more contingent on how clearly operators handle and explain these edge cases, not just on routine ride quality.
Third-order effects
Robotaxi deployment is likely to shift from proving that vehicles can complete ordinary trips to demonstrating reliable coordination with human road authorities in ambiguous environments.
If rider normalization continues while edge-case failures persist, the sector’s expansion will be shaped by operational safeguards and evidence of exception handling rather than passenger enthusiasm alone.
The trend: Robotaxis are entering a commercialization phase in which routine rides build familiarity, while rare human-in-the-loop road events remain the key test of operational maturity.
Waymo driving feels (ahem) way more human-like than the Tesla FSD driving. Very smooth turns, natural slowing down to stop, no jerky acceleration. In a few minutes, I forgot that the car was driving autonomously. Made me a convert from one who didn't want to take a driverless …
From talking to friends who've tried Waymo, the technology is surprisingly good and close to a magical experience. While I'm still skeptical that this can ever be a huge profitable business, it's clear that Waymo has the tech figured out on these routes.
We're getting closer to self-driving, and this push for driver benefits is like a more proactive version of the writers' strike. The writers raised the issue when the AI genie was already halfway out of the bottle. Interestingly, while I saw a ton of press about Uber and Waymo'…
Yes. Waymo is ridiculously expensive. I assume it's because every single visitor to SF wants to try it. Hopefully once the novelty wears off it will actually fulfill its promise of “democratizing travel” or whatever
Yup. In fact, we KNOW that Waymo has curated routes and disqualified certain traffic scenarios per, presumably, a carefully-considered risk-benefit analysis. Ditto for its operating boundaries. No shame in that! That is a standard (and CONTINUOUS) exercise of managing any saf…
One thing that's amazing about Waymo's self-driving taxis is that they are SELF-DRIVING TAXIS YOU CAN RIDE IN NOW. Which is wild. Equally amazing: they work well enough that once you ride them once or twice they seem... normal? By me: https://www.businessinsider.com/ ...
I just had my first waymo ride (after many cruise rides) and it's astonishing how far Tesla is behind. Even the traffic visualization is in a different ball park.
A key thing about Uber's business model is that all of the maintenance costs are borne by the drivers. A Waymo costs about $200,000 which is like trying to make money on a Lamborghini as an Uber. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Funny seeing NY journalists like @pkafka writing about the amazingness of Waymo, Cruise just now — I took my first Cruise more than a year ago! https://www.businessinsider.com/ ...
My first time riding a driverless car and I must say this is definitely the future. The ride with @Waymo was super smooth, even smoother than a human driver and the points where the car pulled over were not busy. Self driving technology is the future and it is here😎 [video]