- Hey it's Andy with "The Verge."

I'm about to go for a ride

in one of Waymo's fully driverless cars,

here in Phoenix, Arizona.

As you can see, there is no driver in the front.

I'm not nervous.

Are you nervous?

I'm not nervous.

Here we are, riding in a minivan

with nobody in the front seat, with pedestrians,

and cyclists and other vehicles out on a public road.

It's a surreal experience.

Google has been working on self-driving cars

for over 10 years now.

In 2016, Google spun out its project

as a separate company called Waymo.

And since then, it's been testing hundreds of vehicles

here in Arizona,

mostly for an Uber-like ride hailing service

called Waymo One.

Few years ago, I had the chance

to ride in one of Waymo's driverless vehicles,

but it was on a private enclosed course.

And since then, most of the trips that Waymo does

in its autonomous vehicles,

including the one that we took last year,

have trained safety drivers in the front seat, until now.

It says, "Good morning, Waymo rider.

"Our destination is Baby Kay's Cajun Kitchen."

It's asking me to start the ride, so let's do that.

- [Waymo Car Voice] Heading to Baby Kay's Cajun Kitchen.

Please make sure your seat belt is fastened.

- All right, so we're pulling out of this

parking lot right now and onto a public road.

Oh, there goes another Waymo car.

As you can see, we're in the Waymo central here.

They just waved to us.

I don't think they knew that maybe wasn't anybody

in the front seat there.

And then we just made a right-hand turn,

and changed lanes into the center lane.

It's very natural.

So here comes some construction right here,

which is very challenging for self-driving cars.

And it kind of handled it with really no problem at all.

It slowed down a bit, now it's changing lanes.

And it just kinda breezed past that construction site

there as if it was being driven by a human, quite honestly.

This is our destination.

Nothing really eventful to speak of.

Now, it's coming back right now,

and we're gonna take it for a ride

back to where we came from, which is the Watershed.

Waymo was nice enough to let us choose the pick up spot

and the destination for where we're going.

We had to vet it with them first,

but still, it's nice to know

that there's a little bit of dynamic decision making

going on here with this car.

I'll get in first, if you don't mind.

All our stuff is still here.

That's great.

We can trust these robots.

This time I'm gonna press the button up here

on the headliner, which is another way

that we can get the car to get going.

That was a pretty nice acceleration there,

not as cautious as you maybe expect.

It felt very organic.

Yeah, that's really, really weird,

seeing the steering wheel move on its own like that.

I like the notice on the steering wheel, too.

It says, do not touch steering wheel or pedals,

the vehicle will pull over.

As sort of a warning to anyone

that might try to mess with the driverless car.

Looks like we're gonna be taking

a right-hand turn here on Henkel,

which looks like it's gonna be into some

bit of residential area.

So away from the more heavily traffic commercial zone

that we are in and into a more of a residential zone.

Interesting.

So it looks like we're making a bit of a routing correction.

We're going back the way we came, and the car is making

some adjustments into the route that it's choosing.

Obviously, we'll allow that. (laughs)

We have to make some allowances

for a car with nobody in the front seat.

It'll be interesting to see how Waymo smooths out

some of those things, though, going forward,

as this becomes a service that is available to more people.

And it looks like we're gonna be turning

into the left turning lane as we approach our destination.

And this is the part where I get a selfie

for my own purposes.

I'm about to take a left turn in a fully driverless car.

- [Waymo Car] Arriving shortly at Watershed.

- We did it!

And we're making our way slowly around the parking lot

to drop us off at the entrance to The Watershed.

And then we'll be done and we will say goodbye to our Waymo.

Oh, it stopped for the pigeons, you love to see it.

You absolutely love to see them stopping for the pigeons.

No other company is testing fully driverless vehicles

at the scale and speed that Waymo is.

The company has trained its AI with a vast data set

of images and driving scenarios.

It has a highly detailed high-def map of the whole area

down to the centimeter.

It took Waymo a decade to get to this point,

where it felt confident enough in the safety

of its technology to pull drivers out of the driver seat.

But, you know, only for a tightly controlled

50 square mile area, mostly suburban

and mostly dry conditions, with a pretty basic road layout.

And these vehicles aren't totally alone in the wilderness.

Waymo has a team of remote employees

that watch the real time feed

from each of the vehicle's eight cameras,

and can help with the touch of a button

if the software runs into a tricky spot

and needs a human eye to figure it out.

- These folks don't joystick the car or anything like that,

but they can help answer specific questions

that a car might have about an ambiguous situation.

And that's where human intuition and human understanding

of the entire context is super important.

Like that moving van, is it really staying there?

Or is it about to start driving?

Well, if the door's down

and they're unloading a lamp out of the back,

it's gonna be there for a while.

That's not something we've gotten around to making the car

smart enough to understand, but a human sees it in a moment

and can send that signal.

So it's not really a command to the car,

it's just adding information.

- [Andy] When you think about self-driving cars,

you probably picture something from like "Minority Report"

or "Total Recall."

- Drive!

- Fully driverless cars with no one in the front seat,

or maybe no front seat at all,

or a steering wheel for that matter.

While Waymo's driverless vehicles

are getting us closer to that imagined future,

there's still a lot going on behind the scenes

that we don't see.

I mean, the level of production required

for each of these driverless vehicles is immense.

Sensors, cameras, compute, AI,

remote assistance operators, fleet managers.

Experts estimate that each self-driving test vehicle

could cost $400,000 alone.

And that's just taking into account the sensors and compute.

Is all of that really worth it?

Waymo seems to think so.

I mean, human beings are terrible drivers.

The vast majority of vehicle crashes, like over 90%

are because of mistakes made by human drivers.

Self-driving cars could be safer,

but we really just don't know yet.

There just aren't enough of them on the road

to really prove that out.

So we'll have to wait, until they bust out

beyond this tiny section of suburban Arizona

and to a much larger and more dangerous

and more complex world before we know

whether self-driving cars are really worth all this effort.

If you'd rather see a video about electric cars,

we just did a drive with Porsche's new all electric Taycan

outside of L.A., in the mountains.

It was a gorgeous video.

I highly recommend you check it out at youtube.com/theverge.