When the federal government closed Castle Air Force Base in Merced County in the 1990s, the dilapidated buildings and vast expanse of aging tarmac left behind seemed more like a liability than an opportunity. But by 2018, the old runways that once carried B-52 bombers had found a new and unexpected customer: Google, which was testing its experimental self-driving vehicles there, far from the prying eyes of Silicon Valley. At the urging of then-state Assemblyman Adam Gray, California gave Merced County 6.5 million that year to expand the self-driving testing program at the old base. A few years later, Gray invested there, too. In 2022, a company in which Gray is a minority owner bought four apartment buildings on the former base from Merced County, according to a Times review of business filings, property records and Gray's financial disclosures.

Waymo is ready for a dramatic next step after eight years of preparation, most of it as the Google Self-Driving Car project. The Alphabet Inc. unit has begun testing autonomous vehicles on public roads without human safety drivers at the wheel, and early next year will make its robotic chauffeurs available to Phoenix-area commuters. Speaking at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said on Tuesday that company technicians are already hailing its Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans in and around Phoenix via a mobile app and leaving it to the artificial intelligence operating the vehicles to figure out how to get to requested destinations. Within a few months, Waymo vans loaded with laser LiDAR, radar, cameras, computers, AI and no human safety drivers will pick up Arizonans registered in its "Early Riders" program. People will get to use our fleet of on-demand vehicles to do anything from commute to work, get home from a night out, or run errands," Krafcik said. "Getting access will be as easy as using an app; just tap a button and Waymo will come to you, and take you where you want to go." Google's push to perfect driverless cars, stretching back to 2009, ignited a tech race in the auto industry that represents the biggest change in personal transportation since horses were replaced with horseless carriages more than a century ago. But Waymo has to move fast to lock in its early-mover status as autonomous vehicle programs at dozens of companies, ranging from General Motors to BMW to Uber to Tesla to Baidu, race to catch up and commercialize their own driverless tech. The Alphabet company appears to be first to operate an autonomous fleet without safety drivers, a transition that keeps it ahead of fast-moving rivals, at least for now. "We recently surveyed 3,000 adults across the United States, asking them when they expected to see self-driving vehicles – ones without a person in the driver's seat – on their roads.

The company says they're deploying cars without backup drivers. The company says they're deploying cars without backup drivers. A new study is bolstering the case for putting more autonomous vehicles on the road sooner rather than later -- at the same time that self-driving cars are hitting a milestone in parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area. A research report released this week argues that deploying driverless cars commercially as soon as they become at least a little safer than human drivers, could end up saving hundreds of thousands of lives -- as compared to waiting for the technology to be close to perfect. Meanwhile, on the roads in Arizona, the first public tests of self-driving cars without backup drivers have begun.

A Waymo self driving minivan stops for a cyclist at the company's private test facility in central California. Stretched across 91 arid acres here in the central part of the state is Castle, the name derived from the former air base that occupied this plot that is now a private testing facility owned by Waymo, the autonomous car company run by the search giant. For the past five years, engineers and test drivers have been running dozens of cars through their paces in order to better prepare them for real world scenarios of rude drivers and clumsy movers. For Waymo workers toiling in secrecy under a hot sun, the first-ever arrival Monday of a gaggle of reporters was a bit of a coming out party. "I've been out here for five years testing and testing," said Stephanie Villegas, head of structured testing, during a demonstration that showed how a self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivan would yield to an aggressive driver.

A Waymo minivan outfitted with self-driving sensors brakes suddenly for a black car that has backed out of a driveway without looking. The test was conducted at Waymo's testing facility in central California. As someone covering this emerging transportation revolution, I've had a number of opportunities over the years to sit in autonomous cars as they ply either closed courses or real roads. But in every instance a so-called safety driver has been behind the wheel. Waymo, the name of Google's nine-year-old self-driving car company, popped me and another reporter into a Chrysler Pacifica laden with sensors and closed the door.

Life is a complex problem. Consider the simple act of moving from point A to point B. Solving for that equation requires synthesizing numerous variables, like speed and obstacles. What if you make it more complicated? Throw in some jaywalking pedestrians, rule-bending cyclists, and, the most erratic variable of all--other drivers. Drivers who are potentially distracted, potentially sleepy, potentially ragey, potentially drunk.