It’s fast becoming the new way to travel in major American cities and the best bit – there’s no Trump chat! I’m talking about Waymo One, the driverless taxi.

Waymo is an American autonomous driving technology company and a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. It originated from the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, with the mission of making transportation safer and more accessible for people and goods.

Waymo is an app based service so you’ll need a smartphone that’s compatible with their app. Once you’ve signed up and entered a payment card, booking a ride is exactly the same as booking an Uber or Lyft ride. Additionally you’ll get real time updates on when your car will arrive. I found this to be fairly accurate.

I took my first Waymo ride in San Francisco back in 2024, a short trip from the Golden Gate Bridge to Fisherman’s Wharf. It was an interesting experience with two main takeaways – it drives like your 80 year old granny and it won’t double park

Fast forward now to summer 2025 and Los Angeles and my latest Waymo experiences. I booked a Waymo to take me from the Cows End Cafe on Venice Beach to the the shopping complex at Marina Del Ray. Once you’ve placed your booking via the app, you’ll get realtime up dates on when it will arrive. On the whole this was fairly accurate although it did slip by a couple of minutes due to traffic. Of all the journey’s I’ve taken, I’ve been able to book a Waymo and then not wait any longer than 10 minutes for it to arrive. So broadly speaking, the same as Uber and Lyft. On pricing it’s compatatble with the latter and sometimes cheaper at peak times.

Once your taxi arrives and you’ll know it’s yours as it has your initails flashing on a revolving drome on its roof, you’ll need to unlock the doors using the button in the app on your smartphone.Once you’re inside and belted in, you’ll need to push the ‘Start Journey’ button on the mini display in the center console for the ride to begin. And that’s it.

You’ll be entertained enroute by Waymo’s playist of soft spa music – but you can change that on the center consiole for pretty much what ever you want. On reaching your destination, you’ll be prompted to open the doors and leaving to complete your trip.

One final though, I was highly impressed when it pulled over to let a host of 911 responder vehicles through. 

Happy travelling and let me know your experiences of using Waymo.