The Cognitive Driver: Waymo, Autonomous Mobility, and a Very Unusual Evening in West Hollywood

When the Car Drives You

A few months ago in Los Angeles, I stepped into a car with no driver — and it drove me.

I had travelled from London to LA with my friends, Tony and Phillip, for a helicopter safety course at the Robinson Helicopter Company. Three entrepreneurs, three helicopter pilots, and apparently three very different personalities encountering the future of transport.

Tony, Jenni and Phillip getting ready for their first Waymo ride in West Hollywood

Our first Waymo appeared on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood — silently, driverless, and slightly unreal. It felt like the moment Michael J. Fox met Doc’s DeLorean in Back to the Future, only without the noise, the drama, or the driver.

I unlocked the car with a tap on the app. The doors opened and we climbed in. A soothing voice welcomed me by name and asked us to fasten our seatbelts.

Then came the surreal moment — the gear shifted, the steering wheel turned, the car pulled away. The driver’s seat remained empty.

You notice everything. Then you relax.

No small talk. No distraction. No negotiation. Just computation, sensing, and execution.

This wasn’t transport. It was digital cognition on wheels.

Meet the Passengers

To understand the experience properly, you must understand the characters.

Tony — The Host of Every Journey

The ultimate family man — warm, endlessly kind, and enthusiastically talkative.

Tony immediately loved two things about Waymo:

• that we could play our own music

• that the vehicle was the beautifully British Jaguar I-PACE

“Wow, let’s put on some music,” he said, already scrolling.

Within minutes we were being chauffeured by a robot while Tony curated the soundtrack like a DJ hosting a dinner party.

Phillip — Minimalist, Philosopher, Anti‑Bag Activist

Phillip is thoughtful, clever, and famous for delivering perfectly timed deadpan one-liners, usually unintentionally.

He also does not believe in bags.

Instead, Phillip carries each individual possession separately:

·       phone in one hand

·       wallet in the other

·       sunglasses suspended by pure faith

·       a pen clamped to a notebook with his thumb

·       coffee handled with heroic determination

After studying the empty driver’s seat, he simply said: "At last, a driver with no opinions."

And Me

A slightly giddy AI enthusiast, seeing not just transport but a new form of productive capacity.

Autonomous vehicles are not just a service. They represent a structural shift in how work gets done. And the scale of this shift is enormous.

The Global Autonomous Vehicle Market

Autonomous mobility is scaling rapidly.

• The global autonomous vehicle market is projected to exceed $400 billion within the next decade.

• Governments across the US, China, Europe, and the UK are building regulatory frameworks.

• Major technology firms, automakers, and logistics companies are competing to deploy autonomous fleets.

This isn’t a product cycle — it’s infrastructure.

Autonomous vehicles introduce non‑human productive capacity directly into public systems, expanding economic output at societal scale.

From a Pignatelli Framework perspective, transport becomes a source of machine FTE productivity embedded in infrastructure.

To understand why this matters, you need to understand how these systems actually work.

The Geek Section: How Robotaxi Systems Actually Work

Autonomous Driving System Comparison

These systems reflect very different approaches to machine intelligence.

The competition is not about cars. It is about how societies deploy machine cognition.

Automation vs Augmentation: The Real Divide

The autonomous vehicle race reveals a strategic distinction shaping the future of work.

Automation removes the human entirely. Waymo replaces the driver with machine cognition, creating scalable machine labour capacity.

Augmentation enhances the human. Systems such as Tesla assist drivers but keep humans responsible.

In Pignatelli Framework terms:

• Automation = machine FTE productivity (mFTE)

• Augmentation = augmented FTE productivity (aFTE)

The difference is structural. Automation creates new productive capacity that operates continuously and independently of human time. Augmentation improves human efficiency but does not change the underlying production model.

For leaders, the choice is strategic: optimise human performance  or redesign how work is produced. The decision shapes cost structures, productivity growth, and organisational resilience.

Waymo: The Benchmark for Full Autonomy

"Waymo isn’t building cars.

It’s building a driver that operates across multiple vehicle types."

If the autonomous vehicle market is a race, Waymo currently sets the benchmark for fully driverless mobility.

Launched within Google in 2009 as the Self-Driving Car Project, the initiative led by Sebastian Thrun and Anthony Levandowski sought to move autonomous driving from research to reality. Spun out in 2016 as Waymo under Alphabet Inc., it has since grown into a large-scale commercial autonomous transport platform.

Waymo, today, is led by co-CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov with a mission to  be “the world’s most trusted driver”.

Scale and Deployment

• Over 200 million autonomous miles driven on public roads

• Hundreds of thousands of weekly fully driverless rides

• Operations across major urban environments

• Expansion plans across international cities including London and Tokyo

Unlike many competitors, Waymo already operates fully driverless commercial services.

The 6th‑Generation Autonomous Driver

Waymo’s latest platform integrates multi‑sensor perception (lidar, radar, cameras and external audio receivers), real‑time behavioural prediction, and continuous learning from millions of miles. The system independently performs perception, judgement, navigation, and risk management.

The innovation isn’t the car — it’s the driver

Next‑Generation Fleet

Waymo is expanding beyond its Jaguar I‑PACE fleet into Hyundai IONIQ 5 vehicles and purpose‑built autonomous platforms such as the Zeekr‑built “Ojai” robotaxi.

This marks a fundamental shift.

Waymo isn’t building cars. It’s building a driver that operates across multiple vehicle types.

Mobility is being designed around machine cognition rather than retrofitted for autonomy. It is the company’s organising principle, enabling higher scale, lower cost, and continuous operation

Scrutiny, Risk, and Regulation: The Necessary Friction of Innovation

Market leaders attract scrutiny, and Waymo is no exception. Incidents, edge cases, and public concerns continue to shape debate around safety, liability, and trust.

Yet scrutiny drives progress. Every failure is analysed, every system improved. Deployment at scale invites examination and examination accelerates learning.

Regulation and Data Governance for Waymo’s arrival in London

The UK’s Automated Vehicles Act 2024 introduces a new legal category of authorised autonomous vehicles and shifts responsibility from drivers to system operators. Vehicles must meet strict safety standards and remain under continuous regulatory oversight.

Data protection law is not replaced but clarified. Autonomous systems must comply with GDPR requirements for data use and privacy.

The aim is simple: enable innovation while protecting public trust.

Back to the West Hollywood Moment

When our ride ended, Tony thanked the car verbally. Phillip carefully reassembled his many independent belongings.

And I realised something profound: the vehicle had not simply transported us. It had created private space, productive time, personalised experience, and predictable safety.

Infrastructure performing cognitive labour.

Looking Ahead — London Evenings

Autonomous mobility is scaling globally, and London is preparing for deployment through new regulatory frameworks and pilot programmes. Waymo is expected to arrive as early as September.

I can’t wait for it to reach our corner of London — partly for the technology, but mostly for another evening with Tony and Phillip. Three entrepreneurs, three helicopter pilots, Tony choosing the playlist, and a driverless car waiting outside a London restaurant.

The car that drives itself.

Phillip, meanwhile, continues his personal protest against bags.

References

Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2020). AI and jobs: Evidence from online vacancies. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 34(1), 3–30.

Alphabet Inc. (2024). Alphabet Annual Report 2024.

Amazon / Zoox (2024). Zoox Autonomous Mobility Platform. Available at: https://www.zoox.com

Autor, D. (2015). Why are there still so many jobs? The history and future of workplace automation. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29(3), 3–30.

Baidu (2024). Apollo Autonomous Driving Platform.

Brynjolfsson, E., & McAfee, A. (2017). Machine, Platform, Crowd. New York: W.W. Norton.

Brynjolfsson, E., Mitchell, T., & Rock, D. (2018). What can machines learn and what does it mean for occupations? AEA Papers and Proceedings, 108, 43–47.

General Motors (2023). Cruise Autonomous Vehicle Safety Report.

Grigorescu, S., Trasnea, B., Cocias, T., & Macesanu, G. (2020). A survey of deep learning techniques for autonomous driving. Journal of Field Robotics, 37(3), 362–386.

Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) (2023). Guide to UK GDPR.

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) (2024). Automated Driving Research.

International Transport Forum (OECD) (2023). Autonomous Vehicles and the Future of Mobility.

McKinsey & Company (2023). Autonomous driving’s future: Convenient and Connected

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) (2023). Automated Vehicle Safety Evaluation Reports.

Reuters (2024). Waymo expands robotaxi services and autonomous operations.

Statista (2025). Autonomous vehicles market size worldwide.

Sun, P., Kretzschmar, H., Dotiwalla, X., et al. (2020). Scalability in perception for autonomous driving: Waymo Open Dataset. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2446–2454.

Tesla Inc. (2024). Full Self-Driving Capability Overview. Available at: https://www.tesla.com

Thrun, S. (2010). Toward robotic cars. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 99–106.

UK Department for Transport (2024). Connected and Automated Mobility Roadmap 2030.

UK Law Commission (2023). Automated Vehicles: Regulatory Framework.

Waymo (2023). Waymo Safety Report: On the Road to Fully Self-Driving.

Waymo (2024). The Waymo Driver: 6th Generation Autonomous Driving System. Available at: https://waymo.com/blog/