Common Waymo One Questions

When you think about the people behind the Waymo Driver, you might think of the engineers writing the software algorithms or developing our state-of-the-art hardware. But there’s another group that deserves a lot of credit too: our riders.

Since we launched our early rider program in Phoenix back in 2017 (now the Trusted Tester program), our riders’ feedback has played a huge role in shaping the Waymo Driver and the fully autonomous service we offer with Waymo One today in the East Valley. In fact, feedback in all forms has been integral to our product development since we started out - from employees, friends and family, to guests who got a chance to experience our technology early on.

 In addition to the troves of awesome feedback we receive on how cool it is to ride alone and how magical the experience is, our riders also provide feedback on more detailed aspects of their ride: the pickup and dropoff, the route we take between the two, the in-car features they want to see, and so on. They let us know if the drive felt smooth, how the ETA for their trip was today, or if once again, they couldn’t believe how incredible a ride with no human driver can be. All of that feedback is reviewed by our team and used to improve our service. Simply put, we couldn’t do it without our riders!

From this feedback, we’ve identified some common questions our riders have about our rider-only service in Phoenix, like routing or how the Waymo Driver interacts with other road users. Many are also curious how their feedback ends up getting implemented.

To help answer these questions and demystify some of these top-of-mind topics, we dug in with our in-house subject matter experts (think: product managers and user experience researchers) to break down how we are tackling these interesting scenarios and improving our capabilities to make Waymo One the best it can be, in Phoenix, San Francisco (where we just launched the SF Trusted Tester program), and every city we bring the Waymo Driver to next.

So, grab your popcorn and tune in through the link below or head on over to our YouTube channel to hear firsthand how valuable our riders’ feedback is and how it’s used to improve Waymo One from pickup to drop off and everything in between.