My first self-driving car ride with an empty driver seat was surprisingly not terrifying

Last year at CES, I rode in what felt like an endless stream of self-driving cars up and down the Las Vegas Strip. Lo and behold, for every ride a “safety engineer” or “operator” was inches from the steering wheel, foot hovering above the brake. Safety first, I get it. But still, lame.

This year Russian self-driving company Yandex moved the safety driver to the passenger seat. The front seat was wide open, and we drove for 20 minutes through the streets of Sin City. Decidedly not lame.

Yandex, which has been likened to the Russian Google, already runs a robo-taxi service in a small Russian city with five Yandex cars dropping off riders (free for now) with a safety operator in the passenger seat. 

Here in Las Vegas, two modified Toyota Priuses had a similar set-up. Nearly 100 Yandex vehicles are being tested on public roads throughout Russia and Israel. 

Six cameras, four LiDAR light-emitting sensors, and six other sensors let the car I was in see where it was going. A computer in the trunk helped the car predict what to do, know where it was going, and sense what was around it — like the pedestrian who crossed in front of the car. Or when a driver cut us off while we were trying to make a left turn.

At one point I felt so comfortable I started texting my family about the self-driving miracle I was experiencing. Then I moved onto email after a traffic delay meant I was going to be late to my next meeting. Within minutes I had accepted the strange reality of no one being in the driver’s seat. Granted, the safety operator in the passenger seat had access to an emergency brake and was keeping his focus on the road and only the road. 

After I texted her during my ride, my mom immediately wrote back, “Scary a bit?” But it wasn’t. Sure, as we rode at 45 mph and then approached a red light, a part of me freaked out that the car wasn’t going to slow down quickly enough. But it did. 

Waymo, the Google self-driving spin-off, is starting to offer fully autonomous rides in the Phoenix area. So far that’s the only place in the U.S. to experience true self-driving cars.

I was admittedly surprised the Yandex ride went off without a hitch. Yes, there were some jerky lane changes, sudden braking, and slow-as-molasses turns, but it wasn’t ever scary. I finally took what felt like my first ever real self-driving trip.