► Gavin Green rides in a Waymo
► Navigating LA streets in an autonomous I-Pace
► ‘We were in a state of disbelief’
There are amazing experiences to be had from the passenger seat of a car. I once rode alongside Colin McRae in a Focus WRC in ’99 as the Flying Scotsman, aka Colin McCrash, opp-locked at speed through a Cheshire forest.
A few years before, I sat alongside Martin Brundle at the Nardo speed bowl in Italy as he pierced the 200mph barrier in a Jaguar XJ220, later describing it as ‘the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done’. I have ridden alongside Juan-Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss and Jackie Stewart.
But the most amazing experience happened last week in Los Angeles when I rode alongside no one. On a visit to see son Seb, who works as a doctor there, we hailed an electric Waymo Jaguar; 100 of these driverless i-Paces ply LA’s streets. In a shopping centre car park, one hooted at a reversing pick-up. The driver got out of his truck to check that he really had been honked by an empty car and an AI algorithm.
A few days later, Seb hailed a Waymo Jaguar on the app. He set the pick-up point – just around the corner from his house – and the destination, Palisades Park in Santa Monica, right on the Pacific Ocean.
After a brief wait, the empty Jaguar glided up the street and neatly parked. Seb’s phone said the car had arrived and his initials flashed on the roof-mounted crown. His app unlocked the car.
A female voice assistant said ‘hi, get ready for the ride’. Doors shut and seatbelts on and, with a warning not to touch the steering wheel, we were off. I sat in the front, Mrs Green and Seb in the rear. This No Driver was a good driver – brisk, assertive, driving at the speed limit. And smooth as a pro. Gentle on the brakes, always anticipating pedestrians, red lights and other cars threatening to do stupid things.
For about a minute or so, we were in a state of disbelief. Then, most impressive of all, it felt incredibly normal. Or at least the driving was, even if the driver was not. And the sight of the steering wheel twirling smoothly, no hand attached, driver’s seat vacant, remained a marvel and a mystery.
To deliver such techno magic, the i-Pace has rooftop lidar, which uses lasers to measure distances to nearby objects and builds a 3D picture of the car’s surroundings. Cameras, lidar and radar are incorporated in pods on the front wings and there are other cameras and sensors galore. Plus AI algorithms that I can neither comprehend or explain.
One of the seriously big brains behind it all is German-born former Stanford University professor Sebastian Thrun, who I’ve been following for years. He was a Google vice-president, is a long-time driverless car advocate, and a founder of the Waymo project. Waymo is now the autonomous driving subsidiary of Google, or Alphabet as it’s known today.
Thrun is driven by safety and especially saving young people. More than 95 per cent of accidents are caused by human error. Self-driving cars, in theory, should not make mistakes.
So far, Waymos haven’t made many. The fleet operates in LA, San Francisco, Phoenix and, through Uber, in Austin, Texas. They now rack up over one million rides a month. Between July 2024 and February 2025, they were involved in 38 accidents. One was the robotaxi’s fault. It hit a plastic crate, pushing it into the path of a scooter. In 2023, a Waymo car hit and killed a dog. It identified it but couldn’t avoid the poor pooch.
Two rides in a Waymo Jaguar have turned me from an autonomous driving sceptic to a believer. They’re coming, and London is likely to be one of the first European cities.
But they’re not perfect. In January, one drove around in circles at an LA airport car park, in what Waymo described as a ‘routing issue’. The frustrated passenger almost missed his flight. And last year the 300 Waymo Jaguars operating in San Francisco received 589 parking tickets, racking up $65,000 in fines. They may be able to follow the rules of the road perfectly, but they clearly aren’t so good at knowing where to park.
Former CAR editor Gavin Green is now one of the world’s foremost commentators on automotive matters, with an eternally open mind