Would You Get Into a Taxi With Nobody Driving?

Several perfectly sensible ways to travel twenty minutes across Austin exist.

Climbing into a car with nobody in the driver’s seat was apparently the one I had chosen.

I had seen Waymo’s driverless taxis moving around the city since arriving in Texas. From the outside, they looked reassuringly purposeful. They stopped at traffic lights, indicated before turning and generally appeared to understand the roads better than a worrying number of the people using them.

Watching one from the pavement, however, is very different from climbing into the back and trusting it with your continued existence.

I was staying near downtown while my friend’s family gathered for her daughter’s high-school graduation. When it was time to travel back to their house in South Austin, I decided this was the perfect opportunity to try one.

“Perfect,” in this case, meaning curiosity had temporarily overpowered common sense.

The car arrived, and I climbed into the back.

The driver’s seat was empty.

Obviously, I already knew it would be empty. An absent driver is rather fundamental to the whole driverless-taxi experience. Still, knowing something intellectually and seeing an unoccupied seat where the person responsible for steering ought to be are two very different things.

My brain immediately began conducting a risk assessment it had never considered necessary in an Uber.

Was the door properly closed? Yes.

Was I wearing my seatbelt? Yes.

Should I check it again? Almost certainly.

I checked it three times.

This was faintly ridiculous. I have climbed into taxis driven by complete strangers without asking to see their qualifications, inspect their eyesight or establish whether they had recently experienced a particularly difficult breakup. Put nobody behind the wheel, though, and suddenly I was deeply interested in safety.

A bodiless voice welcomed me and offered control over the music and temperature. This was friendly enough, though it felt a bit like being greeted by a polite hotel room that had decided to take me somewhere.

Then the car pulled away from the curb.

Very slowly.

For the first few minutes, I watched everything.

Every approaching car. Every pedestrian. Every change of lane. Every junction where the vehicle might suddenly decide that traffic laws were more of a general suggestion.

But it indicated. It kept to the speed limit. It slowed when it needed to slow and changed lanes without the sudden burst of optimism often demonstrated by human drivers.

It was, annoyingly, very good.

Waymo has not paid me to say this. It merely got me across Austin alive, which turns out to be a surprisingly effective marketing strategy.

There was no aggressive acceleration, no wandering across lanes and no driver attempting to send a text message while balancing a coffee somewhere between their legs. The journey was calm, controlled and extremely comfortable.

The only genuinely unsettling part was watching the steering wheel move on its own.

Human beings are remarkably good at accepting familiar risks. A stranger controlling two tonnes of machinery at motorway speeds feels perfectly normal because we have all agreed to pretend it is. Remove that stranger, replace them with a collection of cameras, sensors and computers, and the entire arrangement suddenly feels like the opening scene of a film in which technology develops ambitions.

And yet, mile by mile, the novelty began to disappear.

That may have been the most surprising part of the journey.

I had expected twenty minutes of white-knuckled terror, watching the road and preparing to intervene despite having no steering wheel, pedals, or useful plan. Instead, after a while, I started looking out of the window.

The car simply got on with it.

There is a wider conversation to be had about driverless vehicles: how safe they are, what happens when something goes wrong, and what they will eventually mean for people who drive for a living. One successful journey across Austin cannot answer any of those questions.

It did, however, reveal how quickly something extraordinary can begin to feel mundane.

For most of human history, being carried across a city by an empty machine would have been indistinguishable from witchcraft. Now it costs roughly the same as a McDonald’s order and asks what music you would like.

Twenty minutes after climbing in, I arrived safely in South Austin. No dramatic evasive manoeuvres. No technological uprising. Not even a stern disagreement with a traffic cone.

I stepped out having learned two things.

First, a driverless taxi can be considerably less frightening than it sounds.

Second, the most unsettling thing wasn’t that the car had no driver.

It was how quickly I stopped caring.

Have fun. Go wild.

Jack