I'm standing outside a Sozo coffee house in a strip mall near Phoenix, Arizona.

Perfectly blue skies, maybe 70 degrees, and an imperceptible breeze.

My producer, Jacob Smith, is here with me. We're waiting for the coolest car ever made.

So we say, oh man, let's see. What do we got here? We got a, is it a Nissan?

No, no, it's a Pacifica. I want a, what's a Chrysler Pacifica?

Actually, a Chrysler Pacifica hybrid. A minivan tricked out by the geniuses at Google with

every conceivable high-tech sensor in Gizmo known to man.

So that it can drive itself, a fully autonomous vehicle. Google calls it Waymo.

And here on the else goods of Phoenix, you can order a Waymo on an app like an Uber.

Our Waymo silently glides up like a spooky ghost ship and we get on board.

So hold on, we have this thing. Should we start the ride?

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. Welcome to season six of revisionist history, my podcast

about things overlooked and misunderstood.

We are back, ladies and gentlemen, with a heartwarming story of what I learned riding around in

a Waymo on a gorgeous Arizona morning.

Me and Jacob grinning ear to ear, bouncing up and down like little boys on their first

visit to Disneyland, we were on our way to a new century, a new era, the dawn of a new

age. Although, I have to be honest, the future was not what we expected. It was better.

Oh man, here we go. We sit in the back. You have to sit in the back of Waymo.

If we lean slightly forward, we can see the van's steering wheel turning all by itself.

This car is not capable of breaking a speed limit. Well, I'm curious about that. That's

a good question, right? Like, what if we had to? What if I enter like my wife is pregnant

...