Waymo and the Rise of the Robotaxis | To Build a Driver | 1

It's December 2024, and in Phoenix, Arizona, Mike Johns is trapped inside her driverless taxi. John's Waymo has arrived at his destination, the airport terminal, but instead of stopping to drop him off, the vehicle keeps looping through the parking lot over and over. The robo taxi is now on its sixth lap of the lot, and John's can't open the doors. If he can't get out soon, he'll miss his flight. Hi there, Mike. This is Gab. I'm calling from Waymo support. I'm just calling because I received a notification that your car might be experiencing some routing issue. Please bear with me while I am Yeah. I got a flight to catch. Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy. It's The Waymo representative tells Johns to try using the stop command on the Waymo app. I don't have an option to control the car. Oh, my gosh. After several minutes, the representative finally finds a way to stop the ride. Johns bolts for the terminal shaken and vowing never to ride in a robotaxi again. But in a growing number of US cities, passengers don't have this choice. A tap in an app might summon a human driver or a car with no driver at all. And leading this driverless revolution is Waymo, Google's twenty year quest to build not a car, but a driver. Waymo says its vehicles have now driven more than 100,000,000 autonomous miles. That's the equivalent of traveling to the moon and back 200 times. But this journey has cost Google's parent company, Alphabet, billions with profits still somewhere over the horizon. And the competition, Tesla, Amazon, Zoox, and China's Baidu, is closing in fast, betting that speed, not caution, will win the race. But is this the dawn of a trillion dollar industry or just another sparkly Silicon Valley Mirage? From Wondery, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. You know, driverless taxis have been promised for years, and now that promise is finally starting to take shape. Today in cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, people can hail rides with no one behind the wheel. Technology that once felt like science fiction has slipped into the everyday in some places at least. But the journey has been long. It's been costly and full of wrong terms, and the next stretch may prove even more challenging. Building a car that can see and think like a human has proven to be far harder than even Google's engineers imagined. Mapping streets is one thing. Teaching AI how to react to emergency vehicles, spot chain link fences, or respond to a construction worker waving traffic through the wrong lane, that's another matter. Even something as ordinary as a plastic bag drifting across the road can confuse the vehicle's cameras. And then there are the human hurdles. Regulators aren't sure who to take it when a driverless taxi breaks the rules. Insurance companies can't agree on who's to blame when …