Arizona's governor tries out Google's self-driving car

CHANDLER, Ariz. — The car wore a hat, or something like it. A black cone had been perched on top. Cameras and sensors jutted from every corner, and the center console had been fitted with a giant red button, just in case.

Google's self-driving cars had been on Arizona streets for eight months. Now Gov. Doug Ducey was coming for his first ride.

“You’re going to be taking me around today?” Ducey asked a Waymo employee when he arrived.

“Yeah.”

“I thought I was going to be driving this!”

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, split its self-driving car division into a separate business unit named Waymo, clipped from the phrase “A new way forward in mobility.”

Car companies have tried to create autonomous cars for decades.

Google's project started in 2009, with a bulky set of cameras attached to a Toyota Prius. Soon the company added a handful of Lexus models and weaned the cars onto city streets in 2012. Three years later, a blind man took the company's first fully autonomous ride: no pedals, no steering wheel, no driver.

Waymo's cars depend on a combination of real-time sensors and cameras, human-like driving software and street mapping. As a Waymo car drives, its sensors constantly scan up to 200 yards in all directions. If something unexpected — road work, traffic, a family's dog — is detected, the car's software takes over to slow down or shift lanes.

Details like avoiding blind spots are built into the software, and it's been designed to adapt over time.

The company said its cars have driven more than 2.5 million miles on public streets with only 14 accidents, 13 of which it blamed on other drivers. Four cars came to Chandler,a Phoenix suburb, earlier this year.

Ducey has opened Arizona to the sharing economy, pushing next-generation technology companies to move to the desert. He supported granting ride-sharing access to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. He created a Governor’s Council on the Sharing Economy, intended to loosen regulations on startups.

“I can think of no better place to push the boundaries and test those limits than right here, in Arizona,” Ducey said Thursday morning. “Google self-driving is a prime example of this.”

The vice mayor of Chandler hailed Ducey as a champion of innovation. The director of AARP Arizona said self-driving cars would change lives for the elderly. A representative from Mothers Against Drunk Driving was supposed to come, but didn’t.

A modified Lexus waited for Ducey on a side street. Cameras and sensors jutted out from every corner. The faint outline of a Google sticker had been covered by Waymo’s blue-and-green "W" logo.

“I feel very safe,” Ducey said as he sat in the backseat, but he pulled a seat belt over his shoulder anyway. A Waymo executive and two other passengers slid in. Ducey’s security detail followed in a second car as the modified Lexus pulled away.

A few minutes later, Ducey’s car turned into the lot, stopping about 25 feet short of its target.

“Boy, that’s great technology,” Ducey said. “It was silky-smooth. I know they still have work to do, but it seems like they’re a lot closer than people thought.”

Jennifer Haroon, Waymo’s head of business, didn’t have a specific timeline for when self-driving cars would be on the market. There are still details to work out, like how to program a car to wait in a school pick-up line.

Ducey didn’t seem to mind. “I have a driver right now,” he said.

He posed for pictures, slid into the passenger side of an SUV, and pulled away.

Most Americans fear self-driving cars – and Google's just caused its first crash.