My week navigating the awkward teenage years of self-driving cars | California

When I lived in the Outer Sunset, San Francisco’s foggy beachside neighborhood, I grew accustomed to seeing camera and sensor-fitted vehicles roaming through the surfer and pastel home-lined streets. The quiet neighborhood made an obvious testing ground for Google-owned Waymo and General Motors-owned Cruise. At the time, company staff still sat in the driver’s seat, ready to take over at a moment’s notice if the self-driving car didn’t behave the way it was supposed to.

Fast forward a year later, on a recent trip back to the city, it suddenly hit me.

Not a self-driving car, thankfully. But the realization of how awkward of a time the self-driving car industry is in.

I was on a run through the Excelsior, a neighborhood in San Francisco’s south-east, when I came across a Waymo at an intersection. The Waymo seemed to stop so I started crossing the street. Suddenly, the car jerked forward so I pulled back, waiting for the driver to make a decision. Unsure if they planned to move anymore, I looked through the front of the windshield searching for the eyes of the test driver to acknowledge my existence or a little wave signaling I could cross. But there was no one there.

It was the first time I had encountered a car driving around in the wild without an actual person behind the wheel and the brief encounter was jarring, even for a reporter who has covered the self-driving car industry for a while. It took what felt like a few minutes to adjust my behavior and get over how weird it was. My midwestern husband, too, had as big of a reaction as you’d ever get from him when he drove by his first driverless Waymo. “What the heck,” he exclaimed loudly.

Both encounters were classic examples of what self-driving experts had warned about: the arrival of the “in-between period”, the awkward moment when human drivers and so-called robot drivers would be forced to coexist and pedestrians would be learning how to interact with these vehicles.

San Francisco is early into this phase. But it looks vastly different than what those experts had predicted.

Executives imagined autonomous cars driving through futuristic downtowns full of shiny high rises juxtaposed with green space and pedestrian walk ways. They predicted car ownership would be history, with people opting for the convenience and efficiency of hailing driverless cars. They described a transportation utopia with pervasive rideshare networks like Uber and Lyft and parking garages relegated to the outskirts of cities where autonomous cars would be housed until needed. They dreamt about the city infrastructure that would make the self-driving future a reality.

Instead these cars are roaming around places like the Excelsior’s single-family home covered hills, a densely populated and culturally diverse San Francisco neighborhood that looks a lot like nearby Daly City, famously the inspiration for the song Little Boxes. And the ride-share services the self-driving car industry thought crucial for its success are no longer as ubiquitous. Lyft, for its part, is busy figuring out how to survive. Car ownership is on the rise and cities including San Francisco have done little to make way for software-driven vehicles.

The self-driving pilots available for limited public use are also just that: limited. One of the final nights of my San Francisco trip I tested a driverless Cruise car. The service is only available during low-traffic hours, between 10pm and 5am, and within specific neighborhoods.

At 10pm last Friday, friends and I drove to the closest part of the city we could hitch a ride – the Outer Sunset. We chose our favorite local donut shop, Donut World in the Inner Sunset, as our destination – a drive that typically takes between 10 and 15 minutes, but usually less. After several attempts at calling a car but being told none were available, we were paired with one that was driving by Donut World but would take 45 minutes to get us there. Impatient, we switched plans, drove ourselves to Donut World and asked the Cruise to drive us back.

The car got to us in 5 minutes, but the ride – which should be 15 minutes – would still take 45. For both rides, the app mapped the same route around the city rather than a direct route through the neighborhoods. It felt a lot like test rides I’ve taken on fixed routes or in fake cities built to train cars – you stayed on the track the company felt comfortable shuttling you around on.

Upon entering the car, we were confronted with screens and cameras. One camera positioned in the center of the car ceiling pointed directly down at my friend sitting in the middle seat. (She spent the ride covering her face.)

“Welcome Johana,” the screens affixed to the backseat of the passenger and driver’s seats displayed. Cameras monitored all of us passengers.

As the car meandered around the Sunset, a disembodied but friendly voice began speaking. “Hi this is Cruise Customer support, am I speaking with Johana?” The agent got alerts not all passengers in the car were wearing seatbelts, he said. (We weren’t. I know, I know. We thought four people would fit the car, but the front door was unexpectedly locked, forcing the four of us to pile into the backseat.) The agent told us he’d have to look into how to proceed and that he was accessing the live camera feed. When he came back he said he’d have to stop the car somewhere safe and let us out.

The car kept driving for a few minutes before stopping in the middle of a largely empty road – by then it had driven about 12 blocks and several hills away from Donut World. Were we supposed to get out? The screens in the car still displayed the full route we were supposed to take. “Uh can we get out?” I asked the operator. “Oh yes, it should be safe,” he said.

We ended up walking back to Donut World.