Fatal Tesla Crash Into Home Raises More Questions

  

Around 8 P. M. Friday June 19, 76-year-old Martha Avila was standing in the playroom at the front of her daughter's house in Katy, Texas.  Her daughter, son-in-law, and their children were also in the house or in the back yard.  Suddenly a Tesla Model 3 occupied by 44-year-old Michael Butler crashed into the house after reaching a speed exceeding 70 MPH on the short residential street.  The car pinned Avila, who was extracted from the crash by EMS personnel but later died at a local hospital.  Within a few days, Avila's family had filed a lawsuit against Tesla and Butler, and last Wednesday the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced it was opening an investigation into the accident.

 

Something obviously went wrong if a car failed to negotiate a right turn of a residential street and instead hopped the curb and plowed into a house.  According to those investigating the crash, Butler, who was also injured, claims that the vehicle was in self-driving mode at the time of the accident. 

 

Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has issued a statement on social media saying that the crash "made no sense" as the self-driving mode usually maintains a low speed in residential areas.  Another Tesla official stated that according to vehicle data, "the driver pressed the accelerator to 100% and reached a speed of 73 MPH before the crash." 

 

Clearly, investigators have a job on their hands to figure out exactly what happened.  Rose Hollow Lane, the street on which the Tesla accelerated, is only about 1000 feet long before it makes a right turn going east and becomes another street at the corner where the crash occurred.  Teslas are notorious for their ability to accelerate rapidly, however, so it's possible that the car was traveling at a lower speed at first and then responded to its accelerator, which might have been pressed in error. 

 

In fairness to Tesla, there are plenty of examples of non-self-driving cars crashing into structures and killing people as well.  Tesla releases quarterly statistics on its vehicles that are operating in full self-driving mode, and claims that the number of accidents per million miles is lower than the average for the entire U. S. fleet.  Critics say that this isn't an entirely fair comparison because the Tesla fleet is newer and has more advanced safety features than the average car on the road.

 

All the statistics in the world won't bring back Martha Avila, however, and that is why the family is suing Tesla and the driver of the car. 

 

According to information on Reddit, the driver of a Tesla in full self-driving mode can override the system by pressing on the accelerator.  If that's what happened in the accident, the responsibility cannot be laid exclusively to Tesla, which is why the driver is also being sued as well. 

 

If we allow imagination to roam, perhaps the following scenario occurred.  As the driver went down Rose Hollow Lane, perhaps a squirrel or other small creature darted out in front of the car.  Intending to hit the brake, Butler instead pressed the accelerator pedal.  The resulting goose of energy could have sent the car off the road into the house where Avila died. 

 

Again, we will have to wait for the outcome of the NTSB investigation to find definitive answers to the questions raised by this tragedy.  If the cause turns out to be largely human error which could have happened with a non-self-driving vehicle, then there is nothing out of the ordinary about it except that the vehicle happened to be a Tesla.  If on the other hand, there was something about the self-driving mode that contributed directly to the crash, investigators will want to know what it was, and possibly issue directives to fix the problem.

 

Other self-driving vehicles such as Waymo rely on multiple types of sensors, while Teslas have so far relied exclusively on vehicle cameras, possibly for reasons of cost.  Whether such a compromise will be viable going forward may depend on how frequently crashes occur which could have been avoided through the use of a wider variety of sensors.

 

The course of autonomous driving in the U. S. has not followed the forecasts of its initial optimistic promoters.  The SAE five-level autonomous-driving scale which ranges from Level 1 (e. g. cruise control) to Level 5 (fully self-driving in all conditions everywhere) shows that there are only a few places in the world where Level-4 cars such as Waymos operate specific routes in favorable conditions.  As we noted in this space a few weeks ago, Waymo temporarily suspended operations in San Antonio and other locations where its vehicles ran into trouble with flooded streets.  So for most people, self-driving cars are not something they encounter voluntarily, unless they take a Waymo taxi where they are available, or take a ride with a Tesla owner who wants to show it off.

 

It looks like the ideal Level-5 self-driving car is still in the future.  And even if it arrives, it may remain in a niche market favored by the handicapped, the elderly, and other people who simply can't drive at all without it, or have to hire a cab.  For the rest of us, the price we'd have to pay for even a Level-4 self-driving car is way more than what it is worth to us not to have to bother turning the wheel and operating the pedals when we're in the car.  And that may remain the case for the indefinite future.

 

As for Tesla, which still promotes its "Full Self-Driving" mode of operation in what seems to be a misleading way, the requirement for the driver both to let the computer drive the car and still remain ready to take over if something goes wrong means that the driver's attention is theoretically required all the time, but practically almost none of the time.  I don't know about you, but I would find it very hard to just sit behind the wheel and pay attention to the road just as much as if I were driving, only not drive.  It may be a situation like this which led to the accident that killed Martha Avila.

 

Time will tell, and if the NTSB investigation report reveals anything new, we hope to bring it to you in this space.  But not right away.

 

Sources:  I referred to reports at https://abcnews.com/US/tesla-allegedly-autopilot-mode-crashes-texas-house-woman/story?id=134062374, https://www.fox26houston.com/news/tesla-sued-after-katy-crash-leaves-76-year-old-woman-dead, https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/tesla-crash-katy-texas-ntsb/285-42522116-a98b-4e89-8bae-7db39b5d642d, and a reference to a Forbes report (unfortunately behind a paywall) at https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2025/11/14/tesla-finally-releases-fsd-crash-data-that-appears-more-honest/. 

Autonomous Cars Need Waymo Time Out for Floods

  

Pardon the bad pun.  But imagine that you've taken one of the new driverless Waymo taxis from the San Antonio airport right after a big rain.  The car exits the freeway, and on the access road ahead you see where a nearby stream has overflowed, and water the color of coffee with cream is rushing across the road.  The Waymo vehicle keeps going.  You can't be sure, but the water looks deeper than you'd like, and if you were driving, you'd follow the poetic advice to turn around rather than drown.  You look for a panic button in the car:  there is no such thing.  You think about just opening a door and jumping out, but the car's going too fast for you to try that without risking your neck.  Just as the front wheels hit the water, you feel the car skidding, and you decide to try jumping out anyway.  Only now the water pressure on the door is too great, and it won't open. . . .

 

This didn't actually happen.  But it could have. 

 

On April 20, after heavy rains caused flooding on several roadways in San Antonio, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was swept away from an interstate access road in floodwaters arising from Salado Creek.  The vehicle was later found about half a mile downstream. 

 

Following this and another incident earlier in the month, when a Waymo car became stuck in high water in San Antonio and had to be towed out, Waymo suspended all service in San Antonio and five other cities in three states, including Nashville and Atlanta.  Another Waymo car got stranded in Atlanta during heavy rains as well.  Waymo is working on updating its software to prevent such incidents in the future, but as of today, service still appears to be suspended in Austin and Atlanta, although it has been restored in San Antonio.

 

Waymo is to be commended for taking swift action in the face of obvious problems that could kill passengers in a peculiarly horrifying way.  Especially with high-tech operations of super-wealthy companies such as Alphabet (the parent firm of both Waymo and Google), profit sometimes takes a back seat to safety, and that is as it should be. 

 

Up-to-date information on high water in roadways is currently available through various means, including municipal emergency services and mapping organizations such as Waze.  But especially in Texas, floodwaters can rise within minutes, and few systems can respond that fast.  It looks like the challenge of directly detecting the presence of high water on a road through on-board sensors is something that is either too hard to do, or too unreliable.  So Waymo and other autonomous-vehicle operators may rely mostly on third-party data about where it's too dangerous to drive because of high water. 

 

Despite the drama surrounding the flooded Waymo cars, this is actually part of a process I would call normal engineering.  No matter how many problems a designer anticipates before a new technology is fielded, there will always be some issues that don't show up until the technology has been in use for a while.  This is doubly true for a complex multidisciplinary system such as an autonomous vehicle.  The world is simply too complicated for non-omniscient engineers to anticipate every single thing that might go wrong before deploying a system in the field.

 

Many of the locations where Waymo suspended service were new to the company, so Waymo had its first encounter in those cities with this spring's rainy season.  While California also has flash floods, I don't think they are as prominent a part of the landscape as they are in central Texas, for example. 

 

If I'd been riding in a Waymo car headed toward a flooded road, I wouldn't have had a lot of options.  There is no panic button as such in a Waymo.  But on the Waymo website there is a section titled "Pulling over, collisions, and security events."  They do list an option to ask the car to pull over out of traffic, but the decision as to how and when to do that is up to the system, not the passenger.  There is a way to contact "Support" (presumably a human being on the monitoring staff that every autonomous-vehicle company maintains), but having a conversation with someone possibly thousands of miles away as water surrounds the car is probably not the first thing you'd want to do.

 

All things considered, it was the wisest course for Waymo simply to shut down all service until their engineers can figure out a way to keep their cars out of water, hot or otherwise. 

 

This is also a good example of how semi-serious incidents can flag a problem that could easily lead to more serious consequences, such as customer fatalities.  If you look into the details of many historic engineering disasters, you will commonly find that less serious precursor incidents often happened in the days or years leading up to the big disaster.  This isn't always the case.  But it happens often enough that system designers should train themselves to take very seriously any safety-related problems that constitute narrow escapes.  And they should address the issues allowing such narrow escapes before some unlucky person encounters the combination of circumstances that proves deadly.

 

In shutting down all service in certain cities until the flood problem can be addressed satisfactorily, Waymo did the right thing.  This doesn't guarantee that nobody will ever drown in a Waymo car.  But in taking such a public move that obviously cost the company revenue, Waymo has both given itself time to fix the problem, and has sent a strong message to the public that they regard passenger safety as paramount. 

 

Sources:  I referred to articles in the Austin American-Statesman at https://www.statesman.com/business/technology/article/waymo-freeway-robotaxi-safety-pause-22272052.php, the BBC News website at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgplyxxl75o, and Waymo's own safety information at https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9449023?hl=en. 

Driverless Cars: Not as Autonomous As We Thought

  

As part of an investigation by U. S. Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), autonomous-vehicle operators Tesla, Waymo, and others have made public some details about how their supposedly driverless cars can be remotely assisted or controlled under certain circumstances.  In a report published on Apr. 8, Andrea Guzman of the Austin American-Statesman described how the companies reluctantly shared some but not all the information Sen. Markey requested.  Specifically, they refused to say how often such interventions take place.

 

It was a surprise to me, though it probably shouldn't have been, that autonomous-vehicle firms have staffs of remote operators ready to take control of a car or truck that gets into trouble.  It's a given that every such vehicle is in continuous wireless communication with "headquarters," whatever that amounts to.  And when the onboard systems determine that the situation the vehicle is facing is beyond its capabilities, it's reasonable that it sends an alert to headquarters to flag a human being to take a look and decide what ought to be done.  But in at least a few situations, the human-assisted decisions haven't been all they should be. 

 

For example, an investigation by a safety agency found that a remotely-operated Waymo vehicle illegally passed a school bus where children were boarding.  Apparently, the Waymo remote assistance operators do not take direct control of the vehicle, but merely guide it in making its own decisions.

 

Tesla's process of remote assistance seems to be more assertive.  In responding to Sen. Markey's inquiry, Tesla revealed that in rare cases, their remote assistance operators can take direct control of the vehicle, but its speed is limited to either 2 or 10 MPH, depending on whether the internal automated system grants direct control to the human controller.

 

That makes it sound like the final decision is up to the machine, not the human.  Whatever the details, the fact that human remote assistants are sometimes involved in driverless car control adds another layer to the already complex mixture of responsibilities involved. 

 

Both Tesla and Waymo emphasized that the remote assistants do not sit there watching each car passively.  For one thing, there are too many cars to monitor.  Waymo revealed that by spreading the work among staff in the U. S. and the Philippines, they can maintain about 70 remote assistance operators on duty at any given time.  Tesla's operators are all in the U. S., and presumably work day and night shifts.  They all have valid U. S. driver licenses for at least three years prior to employment, for what that is worth. 

 

The information that all companies queried refused to reveal was how often it happens that remote-assistance operators intervene in a vehicle's operation.  Perhaps justifiably, they claim that is a trade secret that might compromise their competitive position.  My guess is that they have a pretty good idea of what the competition is doing, but they don't want the competition to know that.  Until it becomes an issue in a court case, then, we'll just have to guess at whether the driverless vehicle you see cruising down the street is truly on its own, or is being supervised from Palo Alto or Manila.

 

The mixing of autonomous and human control is going to become more urgent in the future as more and more systems become capable of running themselves.  Less than two weeks ago, on Apr. 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that for the first time, his soldiers captured an enemy position using only remotely-controlled equipment, namely unmanned drones and "ground robotic systems," meaning armed robots. 

 

This historic achievement speaks volumes for the progress that Ukraine has made in developing agile, cost-effective military technology that augments their strength in human troop numbers.  After four years of war against a numerically superior foe, the Ukrainians have become world leaders in such technology, motivated by one of the strongest reasons around:  survival.  It is a truism in the history of technology that wars advance technical developments faster than peace does, and the Ukrainians have shown its validity once again.

 

For years, much ink has been spilled in engineering ethics journals about the dangers of autonomous warfare.  While this may not seem to have much to do with remote assistance for Waymo and Tesla, the two cases are extremes on a continuum.  In the case of peacetime vehicles, you want the machinery to do what it's supposed to do benignly without hurting anybody, but in cases where there is potential danger, you want the human backup person to intervene.  In the case of autonomous warfare, you want to damage and destroy the enemy and its resources, but you don't want the autonomous systems going haywire and attacking your own troops. 

 

Getting back to remotely-assisted civilian vehicles, it appears that the operating companies have found a comfortable medium between the extremes of completely autonomous operation—no humans involved anywhere along the line—and what would amount to a remote-control cabdriver, namely one remote assistant dedicated to each vehicle full-time.  Their comfort zone appears to be a mix of mostly automated control, but some manual control in emergencies. 

 

While it would be nice to know more details, in a free market it's up to the firms themselves to decide the optimum mix, and they seem to want to keep the details to themselves.  Until there's a major lawsuit in which the remote-assistant issue becomes a critical factor, we may not learn a lot more about it. 

 

The question of responsibility is fundamental in engineering ethics.  With the rise of all sorts of autonomous systems that are not quite autonomous, the question gets complicated.  The best we can do is to learn as much as we can about how things are actually done, so when problems arise the public and regulatory agencies are not kept in the dark about where responsibility may really lie. 

 

And whether it's a Waymo car or an armed robot capturing an enemy soldier, it's a little comforting to know that humans are still at the top of the command structure, however remotely.  Unless I'm the soldier—then it may not matter.

 

Sources:  Andrea Guzman's article "Self-driving cars still rely on humans—but how often remains unclear" appeared in the Austin American-Statesman on Apr. 8, 2026 at https://www.statesman.com/business/article/tesla-waymo-remote-operators-self-driving-cars-22192151.php.  I also referred to an article describing the Ukrainian remote-controlled capture of a Russian position at https://www.politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-robotic-systems-russia-army-positions-ukraine/. 

Waymo 80% Safer than Human Drivers: Why Not Switch?

 

According to Waymo, the Google division that operates self-driving robotaxis in several U. S. cities, their vehicles are involved in 80% fewer injury-causing crashes than human-driven cars.  This was a surprise to me, as it may also have been to Kelsey Piper, who writes in a substack called The Argument that if we want to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the U. S by 80%, all we have to do is switch to Waymos.

 

At the current rate of nearly 40,000 U. S. traffic fatalities a year, that would be saving 31,000 lives a year.  But she cites a poll conducted by The Argument which found overall that only about 28% of respondents favored allowing self-driving cars in one's town or city, and 41% favored a ban, as Boston and other cities have considered doing.

 

Piper speculates that a general distaste for AI-powered things may be behind what looks like irrational opposition to self-driving cars.  Some Waymos have even been attacked by modern-day Luddites.  As she puts it, ". . . you can't vandalize ChatGPT, so anti-AI sentiment finds its expression in harrassing Waymos."

 

She realizes that anything like a wholesale move to self-driving cars would cause massive disruption to our present transportation system.  She also acknowledges the tendency of government to make optional things mandatory.  Right now, Waymo is one private company offering a specific service in a few carefully chosen markets such as Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, and Phoenix.  With the possible exception of Atlanta, these are all locations with plenty of sunshine and relatively few days of inclement weather.  And the service in Atlanta only commenced last June, so Waymos in that city have not gone through a typical Atlanta winter, which almost always includes an ice storm, as I know from living there a couple of years.  Ice may present serious challenges to Waymo's algorithms.

 

So there are practical limitations to the areas that Waymo can operate.  As one of the commenters on Piper's article mentions, Waymo has somewhat cherry-picked markets in which it can compete while maintaining its very good safety record.  Even if Boston decided to allow Waymos, I expect a long development period would delay its deployment as the company figured out how to deal with snow, ice, and slush on the former cowpaths that are now Boston streets.  At least the Waymo cars probably wouldn't get lost as much as I did whenever I drove to Boston when I lived in New England, which was, well, pretty much every time I went there. 

 

But there's those 31,000 lives.  As Piper points out, that's more lives than are lost every year to homicides.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate all homicides?  Well, numerically, changing to self-driving cars would do that. 

 

The psychology of why we tolerate such a lot of annual deaths to traffic accidents is interesting.  People don't always act toward various risks in reasonable ways.  The classic example is driving to the airport to fly somewhere.  Unless you live within walking distance of the airport, you're going to drive or ride.  And unless you take a Waymo there, you will ride in a human-operated car.  While lots of people are afraid of flying much more than they are afraid of driving, the chances of dying in a plane crash are much lower than the chances of dying in a car wreck on the way to or from the airport. 

 

I suspect that we have gotten so used to the 40,000 or so traffic deaths every year with some variation on the notion that it always happens to someone else, and if I were in the same situation that somebody else died in, I would have been clever enough to save myself.  These are pure rationalizations, but the alternative is to experience a little squirt of adrenaline every time we buckle the seat belt and pull out of the garage. 

 

Five or ten years ago, there was a lot of hype about how every new car would be self-driving within a few years.  That obviously hasn't happened, for a variety of reasons.  One factor is the expense per vehicle.  Waymo doesn't advertise how much each of their vehicles cost, but various estimates say it's probably on the order of $160,000 to $300,000.  This puts them in the super-luxury class, and explains why they aren't deployed in areas that will not generate pretty good revenue.  Even with the carefully-chosen markets that Waymo has selected, it appears that they are not making a profit yet, which means the whole thing is still an elaborate experiment oriented toward some future situation that hasn't materialized.

 

Still, I will admit that if I could have a self-driving car that was absolutely trustworthy, a Level-5 one according to the SAE autonomous-vehicle rating system, one you could read or sleep in while the machine takes care of all driving tasks, and not pay a whole lot more for it than I'm paying now, I would at least consider it.  But in my relatively small town, which would not provide enough revenue for Waymo under its present operating circumstances, that's not going to happen.

 

Now and then on my trips to Austin, I see a Waymo eerily coasting along with nobody inside, and once I saw two in a row.  I will admit to having a flash of mischief when I saw one the first time, and wondering what would happen if you pulled in front of it and slammed on the brakes suddenly.  Probably nothing bad.  Fortunately, I was a passenger in the car I was in, not the driver, and so the experiment was never performed.

 

Unless something radical happens in the areas of AI, sensors, or legislation regarding the right to drive your own vehicle, it looks like Waymo and similar autonomous vehicle companies may not spread their wares much farther than they've already done.  And that's too bad for the 40,000 or so people who die on roadways each year.  Some ideas look good in theory, but when you start examining everything that would have to change to put them into practice, it just falls apart.  And converting our fleet of vehicles to nearly 100% self-driving looks like another one of those nice ideas that has had an unfortunate encounter with reality.

 

Sources:  A note in the online magazine The Dispatch referred me to Kelsey Piper's article "Please let the robots have this one," at https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/please-let-the-robots-have-this-one.  I also referred to a Reddit item on the estimated cost of Waymo vehicles at https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g8vv7o/where_did_the_whole_talk_about_the_cost_of_waymo/, and the Wikipedia article "Waymo."

Waymo Comes to Austin

 

In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas.  Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project.  It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.  Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure.  Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.

 

Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown.  Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street:  four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic. 

 

We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other.  There were no passengers and of course, no driver.  They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat.  A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is.  The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system.  Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each.  So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens. 

 

I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade.  But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them. 

 

The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it.  This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here.  Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was.  It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me.  I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas.  But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.

 

Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing.  Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle.  You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.

 

On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known.  Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles.  I have blogged about them probably dozens of times.  But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance. 

 

Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos.  I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger. 

 

Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines.  Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far.  According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash.  Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.

 

Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it.  The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month. 

 

There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis.  For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides. 

 

Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away.  The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been. 

 

Waymo isn't going to do that.  All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation.  At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5.  I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/.