 Hey, it's Andy with The Verge. I'm about to go for a ride in one of Waymo's fully driverless cars here in Phoenix, Arizona. As you can see, there's no driver in the front. I'm not nervous. Are you nervous? I'm not nervous. Here we are, riding in a minivan with nobody in the front seat, with pedestrians and cyclists and other vehicles out on a public road. It's a surreal experience. Google has been working on self-driving cars for over 10 years now. In 2016, Google spun out its project as a separate company called Waymo. Since then, it's been testing hundreds of vehicles here in Arizona, mostly for an Uber-like ride-hailing service called Waymo One. A few years ago, I had the chance to ride in one of Waymo's driverless vehicles, but it was on a private and closed course. Since then, most of the trips that Waymo does in its autonomous vehicles, including the one that we took last year, have trained safety drivers in the front seat. Until now. It says, good morning, Waymo rider. Our destination is Baby Kay's Cajun Kitchen. It's asking me to start the ride, so let's do that. Heading to Baby Kay's Cajun Kitchen. Please make sure your seatbelt is fastened. All right. We're pulling out of this parking lot right now and onto Public Road. Oh, there goes another Waymo car. As you can see, we're in Waymo Central here. They just waved to us. I don't think they knew that maybe there wasn't anybody in the front seat there. Then we just made a right-hand turn and changed lanes into the center lane. It's very natural. Here we come some construction right here, which is very challenging for self-driving cars. It handled it with really no problem at all. It slowed down a little bit. Now it's changing lanes and just breezed past that construction site there as if it was being driven by a human, quite honestly. This is our destination. Nothing really eventful to speak of. Now it's coming back right now, and we're going to take it for a ride back to where we came from, which is the watershed. Waymo was nice enough to let us choose the pickup spot and the destination for where we're going. We had to vet it with them first, but still, it's nice to know that there's a little bit of dynamic decision-making going on here with this car. I'll get in first if you don't mind. All our stuff is still here. That's great. You can trust these robots. This time I'm going to press the button up here on the headliner, which is another way that we can get the car to get going. That was a pretty nice acceleration there, not as cautious as you might maybe expect. It felt very organic. That's really, really weird seeing the steering wheel move on its own like that. I like the notice on the steering wheel, too. It says, do not touch steering wheel or pedals. The vehicle will pull over. As a warning to anyone that might try to mess with the driverless car. It looks like we're going to be taking a right-hand turn here on Henkel, which looks like it's going to be into some bit of a residential area. Away from the more heavily-traffic commercial zone that we are in and into more of a residential zone. Interesting. It looks like we're making a little bit of a routing correction. We're going back the way we came, and the car is making some adjustments into the route that it's choosing. Obviously, we'll allow that. We have to make some allowances for a car with nobody in the front seat. It'll be interesting to see how Waymo smooths out some of those things, though, going forward as this becomes a service that is available to more people. It looks like we're going to be turning into the left turning lane as we approach our destination. This is the part where I get a selfie for my own purposes. I'm about to take a left turn in a fully driverless car. We did it. We're making our way slowly around the parking lot to drop us off at the entrance to the watershed. Then we'll be done, and we will say goodbye to our Waymo. It stopped for the pigeons. You'd love to see it. You'd absolutely love to see them stopping for the pigeons. No other company is testing fully driverless vehicles at the scale and speed that Waymo is. The company has trained its AI with a vast data set of images and driving scenarios. It has a highly detailed high-def map of the whole area down to the centimeter. It took Waymo a decade to get to this point where it felt confident enough in the safety of its technology to pull drivers out of the driver's seat. Only for a tightly controlled 50 square mile area, mostly suburban and mostly dry conditions with a pretty basic road layout. These vehicles aren't totally alone in the wilderness. Waymo has a team of remote employees that watch the real-time feed from each of the vehicle's eight cameras and can help with the touch of a button if the software runs into a tricky spot and needs a human eye to figure it out. These folks don't joystick the car or anything like that, but they can help answer specific questions that a car might have about an ambiguous situation. And that's where human intuition and human understanding of the entire context is super important. Like, you know, that moving van, is it really staying there or is it about to start driving? Well, if the door's down and they're unloading a lamp out of the back, it's going to be there for a while. That's not something we've gotten around to making the car smart enough to understand, but a human sees it in a moment and can send that signal. So it's not really a command to the car, it's just adding information. When you think about self-driving cars, you probably picture something from like Minority Report or Total Recall. Fully driverless cars with no one in the front seat, or maybe no front seat at all, or steering wheel for that matter. While Waymo's driverless vehicles are getting us closer to that imagined future, there's still a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't see. I mean, the level of production required for each of these driverless vehicles is immense. Sensors, cameras, compute, AI, remote assistance operators, fleet managers. Experts estimate that each self-driving test vehicle could cost $400,000 alone, and that's just taking into account the sensors and compute. Is all of that really worth it? Waymo seems to think so. I mean, human beings are terrible drivers. The vast majority of vehicle crashes, like over 90%, are because of mistakes made by human drivers. Self-driving cars could be safer, but we really just don't know yet. There just aren't enough of them on the road to really prove that out. So we'll have to wait until they bust out beyond this tiny section of suburban Arizona and to a much larger and more dangerous and more complex world before we know whether self-driving cars are really worth all this effort. If you'd rather see a video about electric cars, we just did a drive with Porsche's new all-electric Taycan outside of LA in the mountains. It was a gorgeous video. I highly recommend you check it out at youtube.com slash the verge.