“Here it comes,” I call out to photographer William Walker. “Yeah, there’s no one driving.”
As Walker’s shutter rapid-fires and the upfitted Chrysler Pacifica plug-in hybrid electric vehicle pulls up to where I’m standing on a residential cul-de-sac in Chandler, Arizona, I realize my mistake. There’s no one in the driver’s seat, but someone—something—is definitely driving.
We’ve traveled from Los Angeles to the Phoenix suburbs to experience the type of vehicle that might just put us automotive journalists out of business: the Waymo One. You might remember it as the Google Self-Driving Car Project we first experienced in 2015, but it’s now an independent company wholly owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. We’re here to explore two fundamental questions: How well does it work, and how the hell do we review cars we can’t drive?
The Chrysler Pacifica–based Waymo autonomous taxi vans you can hail today in Arizona are fourth-generation vehicles. The fifth generation is based on the Jaguar I-Pace EV, its hardware and software are more sophisticated, and the hardware is downsized. But fifth-gen vehicles are only open to Waymo employees for now.
Each Pacifica is outfitted with 19 cameras, one long-range and one midrange lidar sensor, four short-range lidar sensors, and six radar sensors. (You can order a Pacifica from the factory with radar, camera, and ultrasonic sensors that provide advanced driver aids, but Waymo doesn’t use any of that equipment.) A computer stack in the cargo area processes all the data from the sensors, along with high-definition map data.
Waymo doesn’t buy hardware or software from suppliers; the company builds its own sensors, computers, and software. It produces its own maps of its service area; it does not rely on Google Maps.
Inside, Waymo repurposes the Pacifica’s rear entertainment system to display the route and
