In a pinch, if you need to change the subject away from politics at a summer family picnic, you can always throw out something equally partisan and divisive: “What navigation app do you guys use for driving?” This will bring out the same level of heated debate as Faux News vs. MSDNC and iPhones versus green texters, so at least it’ll be a deflection. When others use any other navigation, it feels to me like the equivalent of opening the dash and slowly unfolding a worn map that’s about to block the entire windshield.
I’m an enthusiastic Wazer. I want to drive through someone’s living room to see what they’re watching on Netflix to save 0.5 seconds to get to my destination. Save on tolls? Wrong setting. I’m cool with driving 75 on a pitch-black dirt road in a thunderstorm and going the wrong way on a one-way street in the gunfire part of town. I don’t give a fuck. I’m racing the arrival time, and watching it to go down in this video game is the only way to win.
Waze was founded nearly 20 years ago in Israel, in 2006, and acquired by Google in 2013 for $1.3 billion. In an effort to combat against concerns about potential distracted driving caused by users reporting traffic issues while driving, the company recently introduced conversational reporting so voice prompts can be used as a safety measure to report incidents and roadblocks.
Have there been controversies? You bet.
Waze has been known to send you right to a road where you’re guaranteed to get into a wreck, straight into a wildfire, or directly into a lake. It’s definitely the favorite app of speeding enthusiasts due to its known ability to sniff out the speed cameras and hidden cops, but back in 2016, the National Sheriffs' Association actually also asked Waze to turn off the police tracker feature in the app, saying the tool endangered the lives of cops. There was even a Waze murder scandal. A couple in Brazil followed Waze directions to a slum neighborhood that had a similar name to a tourist destination and one of the drivers ended up getting murdered. The surviving spouse blamed Waze, which responded in a bit of a cold-ass, fuck-around-and-find-out manner: “while saddened by the incident, (we) can't do anything if that's the address that users select. Unfortunately it's hard to prevent drivers from navigating to a dangerous neighborhood if it's the destination they select."
But let’s not dismiss the Waze of romance. In the early days of the app, volunteer map editors would drive around racking up “points” by crowdsourcing navigational directions for the app. One couple even met this way and fell in love, eventually naming their cat “Wazer.” Another couple met when a user reported a non-working taillight in a chat feature at a toll booth; she offered to thank him over coffee; four years later they were planning their wedding.
I’ll admit to being juvenile in the nerd-collector sense that when I was a kid my favorite store at the mall (not counting the arcade where my quarter was atop the machine for the next game of Ms. Pac Man) was the sticker store, where I’d collect cool and rare limited edition stickers for my dorky little sticker album. I like the bells and whistles of Waze. I want to know the estimated time in traffic, I NEED to know the route that will save me 2.5 minutes even if it means whisking by a drug deal behind an abandoned Howard Johnson’s. Damn right I smash the “is the object still in the road” button so that I’ve accumulated a ridiculous number of Waze “points” that have afforded me a very cool hippie van to fake-drive around Wazeworld (party on, excellent), but also access to the cooler “moods” which importantly are what show to other drivers on the road. My “mood” of course, chosen from a fun list of dozens, is the queerest one: a rainbow-unicorn “magical.”
And that voice you’re hearing? Oh I love changing the voice of my Waze navigator. It might be an 80s aerobics instructor one day, a hippie DJ or washed up celebrity the next. Best part of Waze: it makes driving fun.
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