Are the kids all right? They’re in Waymos, at least, now that the self-driving car company has begun to allow Arizona teenagers in the Phoenix area to ride by themselves through special “teen” accounts.
Eventually, the teen service, open to 14- to 17-year-olds, could come to all of the markets in the US where Waymo operates its robot taxis, the company says: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and soon, Miami and Washington, DC. In a country where so much of the transportation system depends on access to cars—and where many people, including those too young to have a drivers’ license, are limited in what they can do and where they can go because of it—the move both promises and threatens to reorder young adult life.
According to Waymo, the teens, and their parents, like it that way. The concept of robot cars still scare plenty, but Waymo says its customers’ enthusiasm for their self-driving cars has a lot to do with quelling fears.
The company has been testing the new service in the Arizona metro area for two years, starting with analyzing the transportation habits of a handful of area families in 2023. For the last stage, researchers, led by Waymo’s product and customer research manager Naomi Guthrie, interviewed the teens who took part in a hundred-family pilot. In interviews with those participants, Guthrie was struck “by the mounting anxiety that we see in that generation.”
Youth Drive
Compared to what Guthrie remembered from her teen years, kids seemed in constant touch with their caregivers, and to almost expect surveillance, with location-based apps such as Life360 allowing adults to keep tabs on their whereabouts. But their movements were limited, too, by those caregivers’ schedules, and whether they could hitch rides. The teens interviewed had some “stranger danger,” either a fear of or strong preference against interacting with strangers. They were also nervous about getting behind the wheel.
“Teens are scared to drive,” says Guthrie. Nationwide stats back that up, to some degree: nearly 5 percent of all US drivers were 19 or under in 2007, the year the iPhone came out, according to federal data; by 2023 this had dropped to 3.7 percent.
Caregivers’ worries, too, came up in Waymo feedback and interviews, Guthrie says. They were stressed by the expectations of modern parenting, which include playing at least part-time chauffeur to ferry kids to school and then after-school activities. They were also concerned about their children getting behind the wheel (as well as their children’s least risk-averse friend.) Nationwide stats back that up, too: Teen drivers 16 to 19 are three times more likely to be in a fatal crash than drivers 20 and older.
Waymo believes there is serious money—”product-market fit,” in the parlance of user experience experts like Guthrie—in being the solution to these many anxieties.
Going Solo
Teen Waymo accounts are linked to adult ones, and like adults, their accounts can be deactivated if they violate Waymo policies, which forbid in-car drug and alcohol use, weapons, big messes, and touching the vehicle’s steering wheel or brakes.
As with anyone who rides a Waymo, teens riding in the cars will have access to 24/7 customer support, including agents who can be contacted with a push of a button. Teen customers’ in-vehicle requests will be automatically routed to the company’s highest tier and best-trained agents. Waymo is also able to loop parents into rider support calls.
It’s likely not the first time minors are taking Waymos by themselves. A handful of anonymous parents told The San Francisco Standard last year that they sent their children on solo Waymo rides with some regularity—a violation of the company’s terms of service.
Eventually, Waymo could have more teen-focused features. Guthrie says that being able to play the right kind of music has been really important to teen riders, and the company is thinking through a “karaoke mode” that would allow them to sing along with friends.
In 2023, the US Surgeon General reported even as nationwide news of social isolation grew, young adults were more likely to say they were lonely than others. New technologies (and especially social media) seem associated with higher rates of disconnection. Might a human-free car present the same issues for teens?
“We don’t want to have [teens] siloed,” says Guthrie. “Our intention is not to make the problem worse.” Indeed, she says Waymo’s team has heard the “opposite”: That empty Waymos can be “a space to unwind or to relax and to have any pent-up stress that you might have from your day-to-day or school day release, and just be by yourself.”
Kids and caregivers have lots of worries, clearly. It remains to be seen if we can add the social effects of robot rides to the list.
