It's December 2024, and in Phoenix, Arizona, Mike Johns is trapped inside her driverless taxi.

John's Waymo has arrived at his destination, the airport terminal, but instead of stopping to drop him off,

the vehicle keeps looping through the parking lot over and over. The Robo Taxi is now on its sixth lap of the

lot, and John's can't open the doors. If he can't get out soon, he'll miss his flight.

Hi there, Mike, Mrs. Gap, I'm calling from Waymo support. I'm just calling because I receive a

notification of your car might be experiencing some routing issue. Please bear with me while I am

listening. Yeah, I got a flight to catch. Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting

dizzy. The Waymo representative tells Johns to try using the

stop command on the Waymo app. I don't have an option to control the car. Oh my gosh. After several minutes,

the representative finally finds a way to stop the ride. John's bolts for the terminal, shaken,

and vowing never to ride in a robo-taxie again.

But in a growing number of U.S. cities, passengers don't have this choice.

A tap in an app might summon a human driver or a car with no driver at all.

And leading this driverless revolution is Waymo, Google's 20-year quest to build

not a car, but a driver. Waymo says its vehicles have now driven more than 100 million

autonomous miles. That's the equivalent of traveling to the moon and back 200 times. But this

journey has cost Google's parent company Alphabet

billions, with profits still somewhere over the horizon. And the competition, Tesla, Amazon,

Zooks, and China's Baidu, is closing in fast, betting that speed, not caution, will win the race.

But is this the dawn of a trillion-dollar industry?

Or just another sparkly Silicon Valley Mirage?

From Wondery, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. Music Wars.

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