My first Waymo ride: How open research shaped autonomous driving

A first-hand account of riding in a Waymo autonomous vehicle in Phoenix, combined with an exploration of how open research culture shaped self-driving technology. Waymo, while not open source itself, emerged from Google's self-driving project influenced by DARPA challenges. It contributes back to the research community via the Waymo Open Dataset — one of the largest autonomous driving datasets, licensed under Apache-2.0 — enabling researchers and developers to advance perception, motion prediction, and end-to-end driving without proprietary restrictions.