Tell you what, I never thought I'd be writing about Martha Stewart on this site. But the woman went and did something that caught my eye, so here we are. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Martha teamed up with Waymo out in Ojai, California, to show off the company's driverless rideshare fleet. Sleek electric cars, no driver, just Martha riding around a little California town being Martha.

She didn't hold back on the old way of doing things either. She called regular taxis a "horrible experience," and I reckon a lot of us know exactly what she means. You ever get in a cab where the seat's busted, the driver's on his phone the whole way, and you spend forty minutes wondering if you'll actually get where you're going? Yeah. That.

Now, I'll be straight with you. I like to be the one behind the wheel. Always have. My truck, my hands on the steering wheel, my decision when to stop for coffee. The idea of climbing into a vehicle with nobody driving it goes against about forty years of instinct. First time I heard about these things I figured they'd be like a lot of new gadgetry, big promises that fall apart the first time the road gets rough.

But that's not the world these things are built for, and that's fine. Waymo isn't trying to send a robot down a washed-out gravel road in the Ozarks. It's running rides in cities like Phoenix and San Francisco and now, apparently, charming little towns like Ojai, where the streets are paved, the weather's mild, and the routes are mapped down to the inch. For city driving, the boring stop-and-go stuff, I can see the appeal. No small talk if you don't want it, no driver taking the long way to run the meter up, no worrying whether the guy behind the wheel slept at all last night.

Martha's angle makes sense too, if you think about it. She's built an entire life around things being done properly. The right silverware, the right flowers, the right way to fold a napkin into a swan. A car that shows up clean, on time, and drives like a courteous grandma is probably her idea of heaven. And she's not wrong that a lot of taxi experiences over the years have been anything but proper. Anybody who's flown into a strange airport at midnight knows the feeling of getting into a cab and just hoping for the best.

The part I find interesting is the electric angle. The whole fleet is electric, which means quiet, which means smooth, and no exhaust hanging around. Around here that doesn't matter much, we've got more trees than people. But in a city where the air gets thick in the summer, a fleet of quiet electric cars doing the work of taxis doesn't sound like the worst idea anybody's ever had.

I still have questions, same as I always do. How does it handle an ice storm? What happens when a deer steps out on a country highway at dusk? I already know the answer: it doesn't, because it stays where the maps are good and the weather behaves. These things are city tools, and judging them by country standards is like judging a bass boat by how it does on a gravel bar. Wrong tool, wrong question.

So good for Martha. She found a ride that shows up when it says it will and doesn't smell like an ashtray, and she's telling folks about it. That's about all any of us want out of transportation, whether it's a driverless EV in California or an old pickup with 200,000 miles on it parked under a cedar tree in Missouri. Get there safe, get there comfortable. The rest is just details.

Me, I'll keep driving myself. But I'll admit the technology is further along than I figured it'd be by now. And if they ever get one of those things to back a trailer down a boat ramp, well, I might have to eat a whole plate of crow and go for a ride.