Moments before I hop into my first Waymo in Austin, Texas, the driverless car is already locked in a standoff with a human rival. I have hailed the car in a tricky triangular parking lot in the middle of a big intersection, hoping to hitch a ride downtown. After about six minutes of waiting, I see it approaching: a hulking white all-electric Jaguar SUV with whirring sensors on all sides, conjuring a rhinoceros with hummingbird wings.
But when the Waymo enters the lot, it takes far too wide of a turn and finds itself nose-to-nose with a pickup truck driver trying to exit. The driver glares at the Waymo, but sees nobody through the front windshield. For a second, man and machine face off in a very mundane version of The Terminator.
But then the pickup truck edges to the right, and the Waymo, sensing this, backs up slightly and pulls the opposite way, sliding cleanly past him and right up to where I'm standing, dumbfounded and relieved I haven't caused a news incident. As I open the car door, a pleasant, corporate female voice greets me with a "Good to see you, Andrew." I clamber in and put on my seatbelt; the car merges cleanly out of the parking lot and into a future that, as the sci-fi author William Gibson once said, is already here—just not very evenly distributed.
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