Self-driving YouTuber JJRicks on his most incredible Waymo moments
With Waymo announcing its intention to launch a “fully autonomous ride-hailing service” in London next year, who better to give us the lowdown on the US self-driving giant than Joel Johnson, AKA JJRicks, the YouTuber who shot to fame documenting the company’s operations in Phoenix, Arizona.
“As a tech and robotics enthusiast, I’d been aware of Waymo since they were the Google Self-Driving Car Project,” he explained. “In late 2018, they announced they were going to launch Waymo One in my local area, Chandler, so I emailed them immediately saying I NEED to be involved.
“They messaged back saying sign up for our waitlist, so I did. Six months went by and I’d kind of forgotten about it. Then the email arrived: ‘Congratulations – we’d like to invite you to join the early rider programme’. At that point they had their Chrysler Pacifica minivans with a safety driver. I took some of my first rides, and it was pretty fun, but it was all under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).
“People on the internet were asking: What’s the deal with this stuff? How does this work? But there was nothing I could do. I asked Waymo if I could be in their public program with no NDA and they said ‘Yes’. But then, in March 2020, came Covid, so I didn’t take any rides for seven months.
Full self-driving
“Finally, on 8 October 2020, they opened completely driverless, no human in the car for the first time – because of Covid. I went out and filmed my first video and people on the self-driving cars subreddit were so excited for it. They wanted to see the app, how you hail a car, basic things like that.
“From the start, I tried to give it challenges – throw it into a dead end so it has to do a three-point manoeuvre, stuff like that – and that became the theme of the series – to see if I could get it stuck or do something interesting. I only planned on making two or three videos, but every one got such a strong positive reaction, I kept going.
“There were three glorious months where Waymo was technically public, but they had a long waitlist. I was one of the only people being very vocal online about my access, so I had all sorts of interesting people fly-in wanting to take rides in that very early service with no human in the seat. People came from all over the world, from Google and competitors, university professors. It was really an incredible time.”
To date, Joel has recorded 199 videos on Waymo alone, plus a few on Cruise (before they got cancelled), Zoox and Tesla.
“I don’t think Tesla FSD counts as real self-driving,” he’s quick to clarify. “The Waymo one that went international was Waymo video number 54. It went to make a right turn and couldn’t quite do it, so it stopped, blocking a high-speed road in a construction zone. All sorts of hilarity ensued. The rescue crew showed up and it ran away from them on multiple occasions. It was a comedy of errors. That ended up everywhere, including on the BBC.”
In a lovely piece of serendipity, we realised during the course of our conversation that it was 8 October, five years to the day since Joel’s first solo ride. So, what’s the state of play today?
“Over the years Waymo has gotten better and better, especially at pick-up and drop-off,” he said. “There’s still a little way to go but they’ve improved in all aspects by absolutely leaps and bounds. At this point, the videos have started to feel a little redundant. I get in the car, it drives, and that’s it. I’m gonna make Waymo 200 the last one for a little while, until they’ve got something new and amazing to show off. Maybe I’ll make it in the UK.”
For a longer version of this story, with more technical details, we thoroughly recommend Joel’s 10-minute read: The Journey from Experiment to Everyday Autonomy
Who’s up for a crowdfunder to get JJRicks to London next spring?
