San Francisco is booming with the most unexpected tourist attraction: self-driving cars

“The first thing we did was build a Waymo.” This is one of the many messages that people visiting San Francisco share on social media. In addition to the Golden Gate Bridge, the park of the same name, the SkyStar wheel, among many other attractions, many tourists seem to be delighted with the more futuristic side from this American city. As The New York Times reportsthese are driverless cars.

And we are certainly talking about a rather unique experience. There are very few places in the world today where you can observe, and eventually test, this kind of service. San Francisco has long been a testing ground for this technology, which has worked very well at times, and at other times the opposite.

Autonomous taxis, San Francisco’s new attraction

As we say, autonomous driving in this Californian metropolis is not something new. The cars of Zoox, Cruise and Waymo have been moving around the streets without a driver for some time. However, the latter, owned by Alphabet, has opened its service to anyone. This means that whether you are a resident or not, you can download the application, choose a destination and wait for the car to pick you up.

The rest of the options are not open to the public. To use a driverless taxi from Cruise, for example, you have to sign up for a waiting list. However, seeing the cars moving without anyone at the wheel is more than enough reason for many visitors to take out their mobile phone – or camera – to capture the moment. Although of course, many also do so as passengers.

Some of the messages that users share on social networks

“Waymo is the future”, write a user in Xwhich shows in a video how a Waymo car moves the steering wheel while heading to its destination on a road. In this case we are talking about a Jaguar I-PACEa vehicle equipped with several clearly visible sensors and cameras. Since these accessory components are not concealed, their appearance is unmistakable.

Everything points to the fact that the autonomous taxi will evolve to such an extent that the distinctive additional hardware that currently accompanies it will end up completely integrated. With the differences, something like what we can see in Tesla cars with Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability. In fact, the robotaxi is one of Elon Musk’s great promises for the company.

We are witnessing first-hand, and ever closer, how autonomous driving is advancing and becoming available to the public. Waymo, the company that already has its service open to the public, hopes to have operations more of 20,000 autonomous taxis in the next few years. We adults will probably be the most surprised, because we may have thought that self-driving cars were too far away.

Images | Waymo

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