Hailing a driverless ride in a Waymo – TechCrunch

This car is all yours, with no one up front," the pop-up notification from the Waymo app reads. "This ride will be different. With no one else in the car, Waymo will do all the driving. Moments later, an empty Chrysler Pacifica minivan appears and navigates its way to my location near a park in Chandler, the Phoenix suburb where Waymo has been testing its autonomous vehicles since 2016. More than a dozen journalists experienced driverless rides in 2017 on a closed course at Waymo's testing facility in Castle; and Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, took a driverless ride in the company's Firefly prototype on Austin's city streets way back in 2015. But this driverless ride is different -- and not just because it involved an unprotected left-hand turn, busy city streets or that the Waymo One app was used to hail the ride.