Waymo, The Future of Transportation?

This past week, my daughter Selby and I had the opportunity to experience our first Waymo One ride. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area and working in Silicon Valley, I have seen prototypes on the road from a lot of companies over the years (e.g., Cruise , 英伟达 , Tesla , Zoox , Rivian , 沃尔沃汽车 , Motional ). I assumed there would be more competition that would emerge by this point, but only Waymo has provided consumers a viable option to experience a safe autonomous driving experience, off the highway. I say "off highway" because I do think there a many companies that provide safe and reliable autonomous highway driving solutions.

Before I jump into the experience and our key takeaways, I will provide a bit more context on myself as I have a long history of autonomous vehicles:

• I have a Master's in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in kinematics and dynamics where my researched focused on robot automation
• I started my career at Northrop Grumman , one of the largest aerospace companies in the world that is engineering autonomous aircraft
• I spent one year doing a Caltech certificate of systems engineering, our project was designing an autonomous vehicle for the DARPA Grand Challenge
• My wife Emily Maynard and I have been fully electric in our cars for six years, and have experienced first hand Tesla full self driving capabilities for years

Overall, my first impression of the Waymo One ride-hail experience is the Waymo technology is not perfect, but it is far superior to the Tesla FSD and the ride-hailing consumer experience was on par with Uber or Lyft , or one could argue superior for introverts who don't want to interact with a driver.

Key Takeaways From the Experience:

1. Ease of Use: Downloading the App was easy and I didn't even have to upload a credit card # as Apple Pay was an option. I could track the car as it approached and when it arrived my initials lit up on the display so I knew that vehicle was meant for me. There was an option to talk to a live support agent, but didn't test that functionality.
2. Customer Experience: The wait time was on par with other alternatives in San Francisco and I especially appreciated that the vehicle could not cancel the ride commitment, too many times Uber drivers will cancel on me which really depreciates the customer experience.
3. Safety: As I stated above, the technology is not perfect as the vehicle made several random lane changes and potential re-routing decisions, and when it pulled over it took an unnatural crooked parking position, but on the positive side the drive was way smoother than anything I experienced from Tesla FSD. We had the opportunity to test what happens when an emergency vehicle approached, a fire truck with sirens on emerged from our rear and the car pulled over to let them pass. The Lidar technology (that Waymo uses and Tesla does not for consumer offerings) gives me a sense of security. Every morning I wake up to drive the kids to school and my tesla cameras are covered in dew and the car is giving me warning signals things are not working properly, I could only imagine trying to use an inferior camera and radar only tech solution in this situation.
4. Driving Experience: My daughter and I both agreed, way better driving experience than what we have experienced with Tesla FSD. The one down side of fully autonomous is the vehicle has to follow the speed limit. Maybe I am just a fast driver, but this stood out to us. It felt very sloooowww driving 25 mph in San Francisco with cars passing us, but I guess that the price we pay for safety?
5. Price: The pricing was comparable to a taxi, Uber, or Lyft. As my daughter pointed out, it can actually be cheaper as there is no driver to tip.

Would I use Waymo again? Yes, absolutely

Would I recommend to a friend? Yes, Jono A. you should hail a Waymo when you are in San Francisco

What should the Waymo leadership team work on? Continue to focus on SAFETY FIRST (we all saw what happened to Cruise), Expand your coverage area, test new business model opportunities this tech provides, smooth out the lane changing and parking, and find ways to accelerate profitability as I don't want to see good tech lost to economic viability.

Best of luck to those working to make autonomous driving safe for consumers (Tekedra N. Mawakana, Dmitri Dolgov, Satish Jeyachandran, Saswat Panigrahi, Ryan McNamara, Mauricio E. Pe?a, Ph.D. ) and to consumers like my daughter and I interested in leveraging these emerging technologies!

Christopher M Maynard | [email protected]