I’ve ridden in Waymo driverless taxis in both Miami and Austin and it is, as you would expect, a slightly surreal experience. When an empty vehicle turns up, displays your glowing initials on the roof, then invites you to unlock the doors via your phone, you feel as if you’re in a science-fiction film. Once you drive off, it feels doubly weird.
Yet what’s most surprising is how quickly it ceases to feel strange. After three minutes, you pay scarcely more attention to the progress of the vehicle than you would when riding in a car driven by any competent human driver. A colleague of mine who has used Waymo on faster roads tells me you experience another burst of unease when the car first hits 50mph, but this, too, rapidly dissipates.
You may have noticed a few Waymo cars, with their rooftop rotating scanners, tootling around London, carrying no rear-seat passengers and with a human behind the wheel. This is a necessary training process for London roads. Ideally, some of the time will be spent observing the car as it autonomously drives itself; at other times the software will record the driving behavior of an expert human driver. Waymo relies heavily on copying human driving data – rather than learning to drive solely from first principles or by pure trial and error.
This is vital because, for now, autonomous cars must share the road with human-driven ones. In a world of purely autonomous vehicles, you wouldn’t even need traffic lights – cars could crisscross each other at 70mph, ten feet apart. But for now, they need to anticipate the behavior of human drivers and, equally, the behavior of driverless cars needs to be reasonably predictable and comprehensible to carbon-based motorists.
To make things more complicated still, driving culture varies by region. If you’ve ever ridden in a taxi driven by a recent immigrant to the UK (and – to avoid getting canceled – let me add that they could be Somalian or German), it is sometimes alarming: not necessarily because they’re bad or inexperienced drivers, but because they’re driving according to a different, imported set of traffic norms.
In the US, Bostonians, known as “Massholes,” are famously inconsiderate drivers. The Dutch practice something called a zipper merge – instinctively taking turns whenever two lanes merge into one; Germans don’t. In Japan, if you turn up early at your workplace, it’s customary to park far from the entrance. Why? Well, charmingly, it’s to leave parking spaces closer to the entrance free for people arriving later who may be in a hurry. Tailgating, the propensity to drive insanely close to the car in front, also varies hugely by country, as you’ll know if you’ve driven in Italy. In short, Waymo cars don’t only need to learn to drive in Britain, they need to learn to drive like Brits.
To make things more complicated still, driving culture varies by region
Happily, the need to introduce driverless cars here is less of an imperative than in the US. In 2023, there were 1,695 deaths from road traffic accidents in the UK. In the same year in the United States, there were 40,901 – a figure so eye-wateringly high, I checked it several times.
There are multiple reasons for this discrepancy. But I would like to introduce one factor which receives insufficient attention: the availability of public transport – specifically for people who dislike driving and who consequently don’t drive well. I’d roughly divide my friends 50:50 into slightly dodgy drivers and those who are at least capable. The former enjoy driving less and drive less frequently; many gravitate toward public transport, often eschewing car-ownership. Through natural self-selection, British drivers tend to be drawn from the more competent half of the population. In the US, no matter how bad you are, driving is effectively compulsory.
This is, when you think about it, the right-wing Darwinian case for investing heavily in public transport: let’s subsidize buses and keep rubbish drivers off the roads.
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