The first self-driving taxi service just launched in Arizona

The flying cars that Back to the Future Part II predicted would arrive by 2015 may have never come, but robot taxis are now officially a thing.

The first commercial self-driving taxi service launched Wednesday in Phoenix, Arizona, Google subsidiary Waymo announced in a blog post. Waymo One is a ride-hailing service essentially like Uber or Lyft except that the car that arrives to pick you up doesn't have a human being inside of it.

Well, that's the goal, at least. For now, the car will arrive with a driver who will be "riding along to supervise our vehicles for riders' comfort and convenience." The cars will be driving themselves most of the time, but the driver can take over "should the vehicle become confused," The Verge writes. But The Verge tested out the service and found that in three trips, the driver never actually took over the car; the reporter noted that these trips felt "mostly normal."

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At the moment, the service is only available to a few hundred people who participated in Waymo's research program, and it's only available in some parts of Phoenix. But the company plans to roll out it to the general public "gradually." This project, which originally started at Google, is over a decade and more than a billion dollars in the making, The Washington Post reports.