Take this car, for example.

Can it drive autonomously or not?

The short answer is absolutely.

That was Shweta Srivastava, senior product lead for driving behavior at Waymo.

What you're looking at is the Waymo driver in action.

Adapted for a variety of vehicle platforms, it is the most advanced fully autonomous driving technology in the world today.

What you notice pretty quickly is that these aren't normal vehicles.

Take this Jaguar I-PACE, for example.

It's been equipped with an elegant array of sensors and software, which allows it to move through the city on its own.

That's correct.

The Waymo driver is a combination of custom design, hardware, and software that is responsible for performing the entire act of driving.

That was James Philbin.

He's an engineering lead on the perception team at Waymo.

I asked him to break down the technology for us a bit more.

The Waymo driver handles the task of driving in three basic steps, sense, solve, and go.

That's the way we describe the highly complex process of acquiring information, processing it, and moving through the world safely.

So what goes into all that sensing?

The sensors that the Waymo driver uses are incredibly powerful, using a combination of

LiDAR, cameras, and radar.

It can see up to three football fields in any direction, and can detect sirens from emergency vehicles, which allows the Waymo driver to visualize the world around it in milliseconds to a high degree of accuracy.

Okay, sense makes sense.

But what do you do with all that data?

Good question.

The system calculates the predicted future behavior for each relevant agent in the scene.

Then, with a strong foundation derived from artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, the Waymo driver crunches all that data and calculates a safe route, while responding in real-time to the evolving traffic environment.

If I understand correctly, this means the Waymo driver continues to learn as it goes, is trained and tested on scenarios that it's never seen before, and can differentiate safe and comfortable driving behaviors from hazardous and uncomfortable ones.

Yes, well done.

Why thank you.

The final step in the sense-solve-go methodology is perhaps the most straightforward – go.

Once the Waymo driver has determined the path to take, our advanced motion control systems allow for smooth acceleration and braking on heady streets, or managing bumper-to-bumper traffic with safe and natural driving movements.

So it's really here, right now, in cities.

Not smoke and mirrors, but true autonomous driving technology.

Waymo is taking what was once futuristic sci-fi and making it non-fiction.

And like all great technology, all that number crunching, all that data, just fades into the background.

And you realize, the dream of riding in a fully autonomous vehicle to your favorite dinner spot isn't just a vision of the future – it's actually happening, right now.