On the way home from San Francisco’s Moscone Center on a Tuesday afternoon in June, the Waymo robotaxi I was riding in made an unusual maneuver. Instead of turning right toward my apartment when we reached Golden Gate Park, it made four left turns, including one across a lane of traffic that had slowed for a pedestrian. The car was still mid-turn when traffic resumed, earning me a few honks and one spirited middle finger.

If you’ve seen the headlines about robotaxi traffic debacles, you might be surprised to hear that other than a friendly cyclist who stopped me to ask about the Waymo waitlist, being flipped off was the most exciting thing to happen in a week of driverless rides.

San Francisco, whose persistent fog and steep hills make for challenging driving at the best of times, has been at the center of a national conversation about driverless cars. It’s a debate that’s evolved since 2021, when Tech Brew ventured to the desert to ride around suburban Phoenix in Waymo’s fleet of Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans.

We decided it was time to get back behind the wheel, so to speak.

Riding with robots

Sliding into the back of one of the Jaguar I-Paces that now make up the Waymo fleet—the minivans are long gone—feels both luxurious and futuristic. There’s ambient music (think video-game menu screen) and a robotic voice reminding you to fasten your seatbelt. A single tap on a touch screen attached to the center console gets the ride underway. That screen shows an animated map of what the car “sees,” including parked vehicles, people on the sidewalk, and traffic lights. Instead of playing music (also via the touch screen), I opted for tense silence during my first few rides, wondering what I would do if the car ran over someone’s cat.

Aman Nalavade, a product manager who has been at Waymo since 2019, said the move to the fully electric Jaguar makes for a smoother ride, but that’s far from the only change in recent years.

Nalavade pointed to features like multi-stop rides and the ability to honk (this is to help locate the car, not express ire toward human drivers and pedestrians). Plus there’s additional maneuverability today: The cars can navigate roundabouts and shared turn lanes and travel on roads with speed limits of up to 45 mph, he added.

Nalavade couldn’t pinpoint exactly why the car would opt to make four left turns instead of a right, but said routes are determined using a range of criteria, including traffic and which side of the road you want to be dropped off on.

Pedestrians and drivers alike gave the Waymo a wide berth during the five rides I took in June, seemingly nervous about whether the car would slow for a crosswalk or how it would navigate a four-way stop.

Nalavade said future product updates will aim to address the anxiety still inspired by driverless cars, despite their frequent presence on San Francisco streets. Features in the works will let people near the car “know what it’s thinking about,” hopefully providing more confidence in its movements, he said.

Nervous glances and angry glares aside, my Waymo experiences were relatively smooth—I wasn’t targeted by any orange-cone activists, and the car certainly didn’t blow through any active firefighting scenes or block public transit.

But reports of such incidents on the streets of San Francisco have given public officials pause over the speed of AV proliferation.

A vote on expansion requests, including Waymo’s bid to charge for rides, is scheduled for early August, but it’s already been postponed twice amid pushback from local stakeholders that has garnered national attention.

San Francisco, though monopolizing headlines with robotaxi political drama, isn’t the only city on Waymo’s vision board. In February, the company announced it had begun testing in Los Angeles, and Nalavade said it has run tests in Miami, Austin, and even New York.

But the City by the Bay is a key part of Waymo’s growth plans, for both technical and commercial reasons.

“Ideally, we want to run downhill,” Nalavade said, describing San Francisco’s geographic challenges as a way to tackle “some of the harder problems first.”

Then there’s money.

“When you look at San Francisco from a business perspective, it’s actually a very lucrative  market for rideshare,” Nalavade said. That calculus is based on a number of factors, including density and the price of rideshare services here compared to other cities, which make San Francisco stand out, he explained.

“There are very few cities in America that are at the size or density that San Francisco is, have the ridesharing propensity of users like San Francisco does, and where the willingness to pay is quite high.”

The driverless-car discourse is much broader than the debate on the ground in San Francisco, and local officials are far from the only stakeholders whose input Waymo and its competitors are trying to balance.

A recently revived effort in the House to create federal guidelines for AV development  focuses on things like accessibility, but also on how to compete with the rapid advancements being made in China while prioritizing domestic manufacturing.

Meanwhile, in California, a union-backed bill making its way through the state legislature would require safety drivers in heavy-duty commercial AV trucks, including for testing purposes. (Last month, Waymo announced it had pulled back on driverless trucks, citing a focus on passenger vehicles.)

And, rocky regulatory pathways aside, Waymo’s focus seems to have merit: Nalavade claimed that the company has 100,000 people on the waitlist for its San Francisco passenger services (keep in mind the city’s population is just over 800,000).

My testing window for the Waymo service is now over, meaning I’m back on the waitlist with everyone else. But as the August 10 vote—which will determine whether Waymo can charge for those rides—looms, we’ll be watching to see just how Waymo’s services evolve with commercialization on the horizon.