Why does it feel so weird to ride in a driverless car?

NPR

Dan Avedikian's recent ride across San Francisco in a driverless car was a mostly uneventful experience.

But at one point, the robotaxi did something the 37-year-old music educator wasn't expecting: The car signaled as if it were going to turn left at an intersection, but then didn't.

Avedikian said human drivers often do things like this — make choices that don’t seem to make sense right away.

"Like, big whoop," he said. "It's the kind of thing I do all the time."

But it’s not what he expected from a robot.

"Because the robot should be perfect, right?" he said.

Setting expectations

Alphabet-owned Waymo, one of the most prominent self-driving car companies, recently announced the expansion of its service to Atlanta and Austin early next year. This means many more people are about to see the Silicon Valley company’s vehicles on their city streets. In San Francisco, Waymos are already ubiquitous. But riders can find the experience unsettling, especially when the ride isn't perfect.

"When we talk about autonomous vehicles, the purported benefit is that it is a better driver than we are," said Nidhi Kalra, a senior information scientist with the global policy think tank RAND Corporation who studies driverless cars.

She said it’s the driverless car companies themselves that set the public’s high expectations. "Their claim is this is going to be an extraordinary experience," Kalra said. "This is going to be safe. This is going to be easy."

Waymo’s advertising campaigns feature lines such as, “The Waymo driver will take care of you and keep you safe from Point A to Point B, whether it’s your first ride or your hundredth one."

Driverless cars do seem to be safer in some situations. A recent study from the University of Central Florida states: "It is anticipated that the automation of systems will significantly reduce the number of accidents, as human errors contribute up to 90% of accidents."

But the research also shows there’s not enough data to really know: "Despite the recent advancements that Autonomous Vehicles have shown in their potential to improve safety and operation, considering differences between Autonomous Vehicles and Human-Driven Vehicles in accidents remain unidentified due to the scarcity of real-world Autonomous Vehicles accident data."

A tricky balance

Waymo is trying to strike a tricky balance between the image of seamless machine performance that the company projects and a friendly and familiar experience that earns the public’s trust.

"There are a lot of things that we do that are very human-like," said Ryan Powell, Waymo’s head of design and customer research.

Powell cites Waymos’ careful negotiations at intersections as one human-like characteristic.

"We might nudge a little bit forward as a way to signal to the other drivers or to the pedestrians that we're about ready to take that turn," he said.

There's also the warm, safety-conscious in-car voice, which reminds passengers to, "Please make sure it's clear before exiting."

The human-but-not-quite factor

For some, that disembodied voice is unsettling.

"It's got this kind of inhuman friendliness," said New Yorker cartoonist and author Amy Kurzweil. Kurzweil's work, such as her 2023 graphic memoir Artificial: A Love Story, explores human-machine relationships; in a cartoon for The New Yorker, she poked gentle fun at autonomous vehicles and the people who ride in them.

Kurzweil said she has taken Waymos a couple of times in San Francisco, and that she enjoys the experience, but she said the uncanny feeling stretches beyond just the voice — for example, the steering wheel spins without anyone sitting behind it.

"That's triggering our nightmare sense that there should be somebody there, and there isn't," she said.

This ghostly echo of the human driver who isn’t there taps into peoples’ deep-seated fears about machines possessing a kind of human consciousness.

"Because we're often slotting robots into human jobs and human roles, we have this little background nightmare of them as actually having human agency, which they don't have," said Kurzweil. "And there is something about the driverless car that is a really good symbol for that anxiety."

Kurzweil traces the anxiety back to R.U.R — Rossum's Universal Robots, a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Čapek. It tells of a deadly uprising of artificial, humanlike beings who were created by humans to do their grunt work. These types of stories keep playing out in our culture, from the awe-inspiring Replicants in the 1982 movie Blade Runner, to last year’s horror film Megan about a scary AI doll.

Kurzweil said she wonders if doing away with the elements we associate with having a human chauffeur might, paradoxically, make riders feel more comfortable.

"If the machine didn't have a driver's seat and it didn't have a steering wheel, it would be less uncanny," Kurzweil said.

Waymo's Powell said the company would like to get rid of these things, too. But despite a 2022 regulatory action that paves the way for this possibility, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration still requires them — for now.

Jennifer Vanasco edited the audio and digital versions of this story; Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.