Autonomous vehicles are already clocking up millions of miles on public roads, but they face an uphill battle to convince people to climb in to enjoy the ride.

A few weeks ago, I took a tour of San Francisco in one of Waymo's self-driving cars. As we drove around the city, I was struck by how comfortable people had become with not seeing a driver. Not only were there multiple driverless vehicles on any given street at any given time, but tourists no longer had their mouths agape as one drove by. The technology has become a familiar sight.

Inside the vehicle itself, there were signs of how Waymo is trying to inspire a similar feeling among their passengers. The all-electric car offers a warm welcome to passengers by name and plays music as they climb inside. A screen positioned in front of the rear seats offers those along for the ride the option of seeing a follow-along map of the route, as well as settings for temperature and music. Another screen beside the steering wheel shows images of what's around the vehicle. As we drive, I can see people sitting inside buses alongside us, dogs crossing the street ahead and children skipping along the sidewalk.

Waymo wants you to see what the vehicle can do – it wants you to trust it.

It is part of a wider trend within the autonomous ride-hailing industry. The technology allowing these self-driving vehicles to weave their way through busy city traffic is being used out there in a handful of cities around the world. What Waymo and its competitors need to do is convince passengers to climb inside them.

Yet, research seems to suggest that the public in the US and the UK are reticent about riding in self-driving vehicles, with safety being among the most common concerns. A lot of it comes down to the trust people are willing to place in the technology and the companies that build the vehicles. But also there seems to be a higher bar when it comes to attitudes on the safety of autonomous vehicles compared to conventional cars.

For Waymo, the solution is to instill confidence in the vehicle's robotic systems.

"There is something very important about being able to know where the car is going, that the car sees what you're seeing," says Megan Neese, Waymo's head of product and customer research, from beside me during our tour of San Francisco. The company plans to keep the seats forward-facing with a steering wheel in its next generation car, she says. It's a familiar set-up in traditional taxis and that ability to see where the car is going helps people trust the car, she says.

Waymo, owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, began offering robotaxi services in the US without a safety driver in 2020. It now provides 150,000 paid rides a week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Arizona.

In the grand scheme of ride-sharing, it is still small-scale – Uber claims to facilitate around 200 million trips every week worldwide – but the market is growing.

It is also highly competitive. Much of the battle will likely be fought over ensuring passengers are at ease and comfortable.

Amazon-backed Zoox, which plans to enter the market in 2025, is taking a different approach to gaining consumer trust. It aims to let passengers lose themselves in the ride by not seeing what's ahead or what the autonomous driver can see. 

Weeks after my Waymo ride-along, Zoox invited me to try their test vehicle at their Foster City headquarters outside of San Francisco on a prescribed course between two office buildings. It was a very different experience than riding Waymo in the wild, across a densely urban environment.

Zoox's offering is a purpose-built vehicle that is bi-directional, with no forward-facing or rear-facing windows. There is also no steering wheel, pedals, and display screens to show the vehicle's surroundings. Instead, four seats face each other, bay seating-style. On either side there are sliding doors featuring large windows. A small screen next to each passenger allows them to personalise temperature controls and select music while a wireless charging pad sits on a flat divider between the seats. The vegan leather seats are dark green and the ceiling has twinkling lights set into it. It felt like a Disneyland ride.

To help gain consumer trust, Zoox has also begun publicly revealing details of its Fusion Center, where human operators can take control of a vehicle remotely to get it out of a situation where the computer cannot. During testing, the company says its vehicles received remote guidance for 1% of the total driving time. 

Waymo previously did not talk publicly about its teleoperations center, but earlier this year revealed it too has humans on hand to dial in to assist. But rather than using remote drivers, Waymo's Fleet Response team answers questions from the autonomous vehicle about the choices it should make in ambiguous situations.

By comparison, General Motors-owned Cruise lost its permit to operate in California and had to pause operations after one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian for 20ft (6m) after they were thrown into its path in October 2023. Since the incident, the company has been keen to highlight the layers of human support it uses with its vehicles. These include a team of fleet monitors, remote assistance, and on-the-ground personnel to provide in-person assistance. Cruise says that before its operational pause last year, its vehicles connected to the remote assistance teams 3% of the time they were driving autonomously in urban environments, but that intervention wasn't necessary on all those occasions. The company says remote assistance provided "on-road support" for 0.6% of total autonomous driving time.

Cruise's chief executive and co-founders resigned a few months after the accident, while 900 other employees were laid off. The company has since resumed testing with safety drivers behind the wheel in Phoenix, Arizona, and Dallas, Texas. It has also struck a multiyear deal to bring its cars onto the Uber platform.

While self-driving taxis are being tested in many parts of the world, their deployment is most advanced in the US and China. Dozens of cities have approved trials of robotaxis on public roads in the US.

Waymo currently has the largest fleet in the US with more than 700 cars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. It's the only paid robotaxi service in the US and is expected to start offering a service in Austin and Atlanta during 2025, in partnership with Uber.