Listen in Sam's voice (generated with ElevenLabs)
Hey kids, it's Dad. Today's story is about a car that drives itself, no human required — Waymo. You've probably seen one of these on the road, maybe even in San Francisco: a regular-looking car with a weird spinning thing on top and nobody sitting in the driver's seat. So where did that come from?
It actually started way back in 2009, inside a secret lab at Google called Google X — the same place that dreamed up other wild ideas like smart glasses and giant internet balloons. A brilliant engineer named Sebastian Thrun, who had already won a big robot-car race called the DARPA Grand Challenge a few years earlier, convinced Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to let him try to build a car that could drive itself through real city streets and highways, not just an empty desert course.
For years, almost nobody outside the project even knew it existed. The team called it the Self-Driving Car Project, and they tested it quietly, first on closed courses, then slowly on real roads with a safety driver always sitting behind the wheel, ready to grab control if anything went wrong. They put a laser scanner called lidar on the roof — that's the spinning thing you see — which sends out millions of laser pulses a second to build a constant 3D map of everything around the car: other vehicles, pedestrians, stop signs, even a ball rolling into the street.
In 2015, the project hit a huge milestone: a blind man named Steve Mahan took a ride in one of the self-driving cars on public streets in Austin, Texas, with absolutely nobody in the driver's seat — no hands ready to grab the wheel, nothing. It was the first fully driverless ride on a public road, and it proved this wasn't just a lab experiment anymore.
In 2016, Google spun the whole project out into its own company, and gave it a new name: Waymo, short for 'a new way forward in mobility.' It became part of Alphabet, the same parent company that owns Google, but it operated as its own separate business, whose entire job was figuring out how to make self-driving cars safe enough for everyone.
Then in 2018, Waymo did something nobody had ever done before: it launched Waymo One, in Phoenix, Arizona — the world's first commercial robotaxi service. People could actually open an app, request a ride, and get picked up by a car with no driver, just like calling a regular rideshare. At first there were still safety drivers in the seat just in case, but by 2020, some of those Phoenix rides were fully driverless — empty driver's seat, real passengers in the back.
Since then, Waymo has expanded to San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, with more cities on the way, and it's given millions of fully driverless rides. The cars use a giant stack of sensors working together — lidar for 3D shape, cameras for reading traffic lights and signs, and radar for tracking speed and distance — all feeding into a computer brain that has to make split-second decisions, just like a human driver, except it's watching in every direction at once, all the time, and it never gets tired, distracted, or checks its phone.
Waymo hasn't been the only company trying this — you might have heard of others like Cruise, Tesla, or Zoox — but Waymo has largely stayed ahead because it started earliest and has driven more real-world autonomous miles than almost anyone else on the planet, which means its computer brain has learned from more tricky, weird, real-life situations than any other self-driving system.
So the next time you're riding in a regular car and you see one of these funny-looking cars with the spinning hat cruise by with nobody driving it, you'll know: that's the result of a Google side project that started in a secret lab back in 2009, survived years of quiet testing, and turned into one of the biggest bets on how all of us might get around in the future. That's the story of Waymo. See you next time on the Lessin Boy Podcast.