Mildly Technologically Traumatized

Marco Arment (0:00)

Have either of you ridden in a driverless car yet?

Casey Liss (0:04)

No. Nope.

Marco Arment (0:05)

I had the opportunity to ride my first Waymo.

Casey Liss (0:08)

Oh, interesting. How was that?

Marco Arment (0:10)

It was really, so it's exactly what everyone says.

It was really weird for like the first few minutes, and then I got bored and looked at my phone, and it was just a taxi. And then on the way home, I'm like, let's book another one. And I booked another one in homes. I'm like, well, as long as Waymo's available, I know like mathematically, it's probably safer for me to take a Waymo than a human driven car. And so I literally immediately was converted. So one thing to know, like I was staying at a hotel, and the Waymo would not come into the hotel's little like loop driveway thing.

Casey Liss (0:46)

Oh, interesting.

Marco Arment (0:47)

It would only pick me up like outside, like across the street. So, and I'm sure there's probably some reason maybe Waymo doesn't go into private property. I don't know.

So I was thinking like even like where it should pull over to drop you off or pick you up, that is itself a very difficult problem. I was thinking like, wow, everything about this is a very difficult problem. Like you get past the entire self-driving thing, which is not a small thing. And they're like, oh, but where do you park? Like even that is a difficult problem.

But it was really nice. Like it pulled up and the app is fine. Like it's a modern, decently, seemingly well-made app. Price wise, I compared like comparing the Waymo to an Uber or a Lyft at the same time. The prices jump around a lot, but they were all within the same ballpark of each other. So it wasn't significantly cheaper or significantly more expensive. And Waymos are everywhere. Like there are tons of them. And you just don't, like you stop noticing after a while. Even like, you know, like we had we had rented our own car. And so we were also like driving that around. But like when you're a driver on the road surrounded by Waymos, it was fine. And being a passenger in Waymo was fine. It was unbelievable, like because I know I have said on this show years ago that I think it's going to be a very long time before we have fully self-driving cars on all roads, you know, the way that we think Waymo is not that it is not on all roads.

You can't have Waymo pick you up anywhere and it can't drive you anywhere. But in the places it operates, it seems remarkably good. And you know, and it's super cool. And there was even like, I was worried like, you know, there was one time during the Waymo ride where like, it had to make what seemed like a fairly difficult left turn into like, you know, pretty moderate volumes of traffic that I was like, when, how conservative is, like is it going to be really conservative and be sitting here forever? And nope, it just did it like, basically the same way humans would do it. You know, it wasn't aggressive. It wasn't overly, like weirdly conservative. It just did it at a safe time and it was fine. And that's how the entire ride was. Like, the reason it was so easy for me to stop paying attention to the fact that it was a Waymo was that it just drove like a human.

And I know, like, you know, if you compare to, like, you know, Tesla self-driving, I haven't followed that recently. I've heard Tesla self-driving has gotten very good, but it's not Waymo good. Like, by the sheer numbers of it all, it's not Waymo good. And frankly, I don't trust Tesla and the way they have handled safety and problem incidents and stuff before, like, I don't trust them to be as safe as Waymo.

Casey Liss (3:43)

Can I jump in here?

I don't really disagree, but I don't, to be fair, I don't really know what I'm talking about.

I just want to get ahead of all the feedback. I have understood, and actually Marco and I talked either earlier today or yesterday, and we'll talk more about that in the post or in the after show. But I have heard, Marco has heard, we have heard, all three of us have heard that Tesla self-driving is truly incredible these days. I get that. We understand that. We hear you. You don't need to write us. But if for no other reason, I feel more comfortable in Waymo because it has a broader array of sensors. Like it has LiDAR. It has all of these things. And I'm not saying Marco's right or wrong about which is safer, but I will agree with you, Marco, that I certainly handle the bad times that Waymo has gone through a lot better than I trust the bad times that Tesla has gone through.