Are Waymos Driving More Like Humans?

My colleague Katie Bindley lives in San Francisco. She's a tech reporter and therefore has taken a special joy in observing Waymos, the self driving robot taxis that are all over the city. I was lucky enough to have Waymos training kind of all around my apartment for a while. Oh. And there were a lot of nights when, yeah, I would be driving home or heading somewhere, and it would just be me and, like, four waymos out on the road. I love how you said, I'm lucky enough to be in a neighborhood where waymos are trained. Is that really, like, a stroke of luck? Well, I mean, it was really entertaining. Like, I remember one night, I was driving home, and it was like this extremely foggy, you know, kind of moody night. And I pulled up at a stoplight next to a Waymo. There were no passengers in it. And all the windows were down, and they were blaring the song Creep. Do you guys remember do you guys remember that song? Like, so creep. Yeah. Yeah. The car was just listening. The car was TLC? Yeah. Having like a a chill ride through the neighborhood. No. I do feel lucky because I think it's been fascinating to observe them, to observe how humans feel about them, how we interact with them. Recently though, Katie told me she observed a Waymo doing something that caught her by surprise. She was in a car with a few other people one night. They'd rolled up to a four way stop at about the same time as another car, a Waymo. And I would say, like, it was probably a tie. And typically, in those types of circumstances, if it's a tie, the Waymo would be very deferential and would let you go or it would wait to see if you were going to go. And in this case, you know, we both pull up and the Waymo was just like, My turn. I'm going. And all of us kind of gasped at the same time. We were like, Wow, that was like kind of an that was kind of like an aggressive Waymo. And we started talking about how we'd all observed the Waymos, you know, being more assertive and more, you know, every man for himself, I guess. The experience got Katie thinking. Was Waymo's behavior changing? Were San Francisco's polite, deferential robo taxis driving a little bit more, well, like us. So then I started digging into it to see what was happening. Welcome to The Journal. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, January 19, MLK day. So to close out the holiday weekend, we're bringing you a fun mini episode. Coming up on the show, has Waymo gone from way slow to way go? This episode is brought to you by HBO Max. Industry is back when a splashy fintech startup bursts onto the London scene. Harper and Yasmin are drawn into opposing sides of a …