Preparing for my first ride in a self-driving car, June 2021

It's June 5th of 2021, and I live in the Phoenix metro area, but not precisely the area that's covered by Waymo's self-driving cars, so I've begun making arrangements to make my ride happen. I will need to get myself from Glendale, Arizona to Tempe-Mesa-Chandler, which I will do the old-fashioned way. I will have a friend drive me there and back.

I downloaded the Waymo app, and I wish that I could tell you more, but it really doesn't have anything that you haven't already seen - mostly information about the technology, videos of the cars driving around, testimonials, that sort of thing. My first question was "What does it cost?" but so far I've seen nothing that answers that, so I'm assuming that it's free. I guess being a guinea pig for a new technology is payment enough for them. I'm an old techy guy, and I know how important it is to have people volunteer to help you test something with new technology. Oddly enough, I've always called these people "Crash Test Dummies". I hope it won't come to that!

My friend who lives in Chandler (and prefers to remain anonymous) tells me that he's been seeing these cars driving around his neighborhood for years, lots of them. He humors me, but is kinda puzzled as to why someone would go to all of the trouble just to go for a ride in a self-driving car. And all I can say is "because it's there!"

I've always been an early adopter to technology. My graphic design career began with desktop publishing in the 1980s, and the invention of personal computers, including PCs and Macs. And it's all the same to me, I just get a big kick out of seeing new things become part of life. I wish that I had been in Phoenix when Dr. Swetnam drove the first car in town, but that was too long ago. I wish that I could have ridden on the first elevator that was fully automated, and watched people stand back in terror as I pushed a button instead of asking the elevator operator to take me to a particular floor. That's how I see things.

This will be a fun adventure, and hopefully just a nice ride around Chandler. And when I'm old (well, older) I want to tell people that I was one of the first people to ride in a self-driving car!

I'll let you know how it goes.

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more