Waymo brought one of its cars to the New York State Fair on STEAM Day, which took place Aug. 27, 2026. Credit: Jakob Maier | Central Current

Editor’s note: This column is a work of reported cultural criticism.

It’s 10 a.m. at the 2026 Great New York State Fair, and there’s a human behind the wheel of the self-driving robo-taxi. Waymo, the autonomous vehicle ride-hailing company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is here to launch what it calls its “statewide road show” with a group of Syracuse high school students. 

There’s just one problem: commercial autonomous vehicles without a human driver with a hand on the wheel aren’t actually legal in New York. There are active bills in the New York State Legislature that could bring Waymo and other autonomous cars to Syracuse and the rest of upstate. (A few days after its State Fair debut, Waymo gave a demonstration to curious Onondaga County legislators.) 

Hence Waymo’s appearance at the State Fair; today, Aug. 27, more than 56,000 people will visit the Fair, so this curious hint at the AI-powered future needs to be perfectly positioned for maximum impact. The car’s trunk backs up to the entrance of the Dairy Products Building, where this year’s butter sculpture states “summers are made of memories and milk,” and the driver’s side — funny to call it that — is within spitting distance of a half-dozen of the fair’s best wine slushie vendors. Right now, New Yorkers need a human designated driver — a friend, an Uber gig worker, a taxi driver — to get home after a few too many of those, but if Waymo gets its way, you’ll soon be able to call a fully autonomous car for that drunken ride.

The vehicle on display at the Fair — a Jaguar I-PACE electric SUV — looks as if a Google Street View car had a couple dozen more cameras and a visual design team from Apple. Aimee Privitera, Waymo’s New York Policy Manager and a registered lobbyist for the company, is on hand to describe the vehicle’s specifics: it’s equipped with three different sensor types, including 29 cameras, LiDAR and Radar systems, which the onboard Waymo Driver autonomous technology uses to map cities, determine routes, and pilot the vehicle. It uses AI to collate and decipher incoming data — road signs, traffic lights, curbs, construction notices — in order to navigate and predict the behavior of other vehicles and pedestrians. “It can see over three football fields in every direction,” Privitera says, “and navigates accordingly.”

According to Privitera, Waymo’s autonomous Driver is significantly safer than human drivers, resulting in “94% fewer crashes that cause serious injuries” compared to humans. A study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that Waymo’s vehicles “were involved in 68% fewer crashes than human drivers.” For Waymo, safety is the main pitch — the company describes itself as committed to Vision Zero, a global nonprofit effort focused on “eliminating all traffic fatalities and severe injuries.”

When asked if New York State’s adoption of Waymo is inevitable, she replies firmly. “Yes. Yes.” 

Complaints about the service, however, are many: there’s the vehicle’s tendency to obstruct emergency vehicles, an incident where a power outage caused Waymo to block roadways en masse, the nuisance of constant hums, beeps, and traffic at urban charging and service stations and the company’s use of overseas remote assistance agents. Last December, Waymo issued a recall of 3,067 vehicles after repeated incidents of vehicles illegally driving past stopped school buses. The company is under federal investigation for a January incident where a Waymo hit a child in a school zone during school drop-off hours, causing minor injuries. In June, Waymo recalled more than 3,800 vehicles after they repeatedly drove into closed highway work zones. “We operate over 500,000 rides per week,” Privitera says, making incidents like those “literally one in a million.” 

In an era where consumers are increasingly concerned with mass surveillance (leading to cities like Syracuse moving to ban some biometric surveillance and cancelling contracts with controversial surveillance company Flock), concerns about a fleet of cameras rolling around major cities collecting footage of any and all passers-by led to the torching of multiple Waymo vehicles during June 2025 anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. This July, Waymo notified the police of a pair of teenagers shooting toy guns and drinking alcohol inside one of its vehicles, sparking questions about surveillance inside the vehicles as well. The company’s privacy policy states that it doesn’t sell private information, complies with data requests from law enforcement when “supported by valid legal authority,” and that its cameras are not designed “to surveil people or to identify individuals through facial recognition or other biometric identification technologies.” What law enforcement does with that footage is up to them; last year, the LAPD posted video from a Waymo’s camera to ask the public’s help in identifying a suspect in a hit-and-run.

There is no federal law legalizing or disallowing autonomous vehicles; that determination is up to individual states and municipalities, making Waymo’s expansion a political issue. Waymo currently operates in 11 cities across the US, with plans to expand to nearly two dozen more. New York state is not on that list, although it almost was — Gov. Kathy Hochul withdrew a proposal to allow cities and municipalities outside NYC to opt in to allowing commercial autonomous vehicle use after a lack of support within the state legislature largely due to outcry from taxi and ride-hailing driver groups. In response, Waymo formed a political action committee called “Upward NY” to push its message to politicians across the state.

“Over there is Magnarelli,” Privitera says, pointing out Bill Magnarelli — the long-running Syracuse-area representative and Chair of the New York State Assembly’s Transportation Committee, who was recently primaried and defeated by progressive organizer Maurice Brown — talking with another Waymo representative. “We go way back,” she says with a laugh. “The Speaker is going to be here today, too,” meaning Carl Heastie, who has been Speaker of the New York State Assembly since 2015. 

There are bills currently active in the State Senate and Assembly that aim to legalize the commercial use of autonomous vehicles in New York. The version of the bill in the Assembly, introduced by Assemblyman Brian Cunningham of the 43rd District in Brooklyn, was first submitted to the Committee of Transportation in February after, according to lobbying records, Cunningham met with Waymo lobbyists multiple times at the end of 2025. According to state ethics records, Magnarelli, the chair of that committee, has also been directly lobbied by Waymo. Magnarelli refused to speak with a Central Current reporter about Waymo. 

Waymo is pushing hard for legalization in the state, but not every politician and elected official is bought in. Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, who took part in a successful 15-day hunger strike to support debt relief for the city’s taxi drivers, is no ally of autonomous vehicles; he allowed Waymo testing permits signed by the previous mayor to lapse, effectively booting Waymo from the nation’s largest city. And Heastie, fresh off a group photo at the State Assembly booth, notes that the AFL-CIO doesn’t support Waymo. We support technology, Heastie says, “but we don’t want it to be at the cost of taking people’s jobs.” 

However, livelihoods are being threatened in some cities where Waymo operates. In Atlanta, where Waymo started operating in June 2025, ride-hailing drivers have reported their earnings dropping between 10-30%, leading the Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union to call on the city and state government to exercise greater regulation over Waymo’s expansion. In San Francisco, anti-Waymo protests have included concerns about lost earnings, but local drivers are also incensed about safety issues and the perceived lack of accountability for the vehicles, personified by the death of a beloved bodega cat that was run over by a Waymo and the apparent inability of San Franciscan police to issue tickets to driverless vehicles that break the law.

Ride-hailing drivers in Syracuse aren’t seeing Waymos driving around yet, but when asked about it, they have no qualms making their opinions known. “We don’t want that here,” says Bashiir, a Somali man who has lived in Syracuse for nearly 15 years. “How could anyone trust them to drive in the snow?” And Emmanuel, a Lyft driver waiting for his fare to arrive outside Gate 3, where the popular Dairy Cattle Building and its iconic INTENSE Milk vending machine is located: “AI came to take engineer’s jobs, then it’s taking drivers’ jobs. Whose job will it take next?”

Privitera gamely responds when pressed about safety and labor concerns. Waymo calls itself “the world’s most experienced driver,” having driven over 200 million miles of road, with a safety record 10 times greater than that of an average human driver, according to its in-house reporting. To help prepare for cities like Syracuse — with real winters — the company has been conducting winter road testing in Buffalo and Michigan to learn snow and salt. She says that some of its vehicles even have heaters and wipers on the cameras to prevent snow and ice buildup blocking their view. 

As for taking jobs, she points out that New York City has around 180,000 human drivers compared to the 1,000 Waymo vehicles operating in San Francisco, Waymo’s largest market. They serve different purposes — Waymos “fill in the gaps” that public transportation and traditional person-driven cars leave. According to an in-house survey, Privitera says that “60% of our riders use Waymo to cover the last mile or first mile out of a public transit location… we kind of see this as an and, not an or.” It’s a complement to the existing system, she says, not a displacement of it.

Today is STEAM Day at the Fair, promising “hands-on activities that bring science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics to life.” The Syracuse City School District is here to promote the recently-opened STEAM High School with a display in the Chevy Court Pavilion, located next to the bathrooms between Dairy Products and the Center of Progress building, which is sponsored by the chips manufacturer Micron (Micron is also sponsoring this year’s must-see thrice-daily Corgi Races). 

According to a press release from Tusk Strategies, a New York City-based political consulting, public relations and lobbying firm, “Students and faculty from the Syracuse STEAM School will join Waymo at the display,” describing the event as “the next chapter in a deepening relationship between Waymo and Syracuse in recent years.” That relationship includes a showcase with Syracuse University’s Autonomous Systems Policy Institute and sponsorship of CenterState CEO, which hosted Waymo’s director and head of state policy and government relations as the featured speaker at its 2025 Annual Meeting. Last November, while “in Syracuse conducting local testing” at CenterState CEO’s INSPYRE Innovation Hub, Waymo also met with students outside the STEAM school to demonstrate its autonomous vehicle. 

At noon, the Waymo crosses the hallowed grounds of Chevy Court to park next to the STEAM School display. A man wearing an orange safety vest with FAA CERTIFIED DRONE PILOT on the back shows a young boy how to make a tiny drone lift off from his hand. An arts teacher has passers-by color in paper quilt squares with what friendship means to them. LEGO bricks scatter across one table, while another houses an ostrich egg and a dried piranha with razor-sharp teeth. A police K-9 unit growls at a robotic dog when the robot’s operator sits it on its metallic haunches and raises its forelegs into the air like it’s begging for a fresh battery.

There aren’t really any high school students around, and the faculty members are more interested in talking up their own classes than speculating about the future of commercial autonomous ride-hailing technology. When asked about the specifics of the partnership between the school and Waymo, a district employee waved vaguely at the car sitting along one side of the pavilion and said, “Well, that’s about it.” 

So what role do the high school students have to play in Waymo’s future? That’s hard to say. They’ll be riders, but also “interior cleaning, mechanics, all the way up to engineers. They could even be drivers,” Privitera says, motioning to two of the other Waymo employees talking with fairgoers. After all, in states like New York, someone needs to keep a hand on the wheel until the law says otherwise. 

A couple fairgoers wander by the display, on their way to the State Fair’s iconic Milk Bar perhaps, or maybe they’re trying to catch Bandaloni, the One Man Band at his performance near the beloved Goat, Llama, and Swine Barn. They stop to look at the Waymo, covered in spinning gizmos and shiny black cameras. After taking a sip from a large plastic cup declaring FRESH SQUEEZED LEMONADE, one of them says to the other, “eventually there will be one of those in every house.” They stand around for just a second longer, then meander off into glory of the Great New York State Fair.

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Jakob Maier is a Syracuse-based writer and poet. Originally from Portland, OR, he received a BA at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. His...