Robotaxis and car sickness: what changes when nobody is driving

The first driverless ride is strange in a good way, right up to the moment the wheel turns by itself into a left hook, your stomach lifts half a second late, and you notice you never saw it coming.

Here is what changes when nobody is driving, what is still under your control, and what to do if it has already started.

Why a driverless ride can feel worse than a taxi

Car sickness starts as a disagreement between your senses. Your inner ear registers the car accelerating, braking and leaning, and your eyes report a cabin that looks perfectly still. Your brain gets two accounts of the same moment and answers with nausea. That is the same mechanism at work in any car, and the back seat has always been the harder place to sit.

A robotaxi adds a second problem: it is a ride you cannot influence. In a normal taxi you can ask the driver to take it easier, or to crack a window before things get bad. If you already know that rideshares are worse than your own car, this is that effect with one more cue removed.

The cue you lose: you cannot read a driver who is not there

There is a documented oddity in motion sickness: drivers rarely get sick, and their passengers regularly do. Rolnick and Lubow tested why in 1991. They ran twenty-two pairs of subjects through the same nauseogenic rotation, one of each pair controlling it and the other along for the ride, with head movement, vision, activity and predictability matched across the pair. The subjects who had control reported significantly fewer symptoms. Their explanation reaches for feed-forward mechanisms: a brain issuing the commands already knows what is about to arrive.

Passengers get a weaker version of that secondhand. You watch the road, and you watch the driver: a head turning toward a mirror, a foot easing off before a red light. None of it is conscious, all of it feeds the prediction. In their review of sickness in self-driving cars, Diels and Bos make that the central design principle: a clear view of the road ahead lets an occupant predict the future motion path, and the sensory conflict shrinks with it. Remove the driver and only the road is left, which is why where your eyes go matters more here than in a cab.

Smooth is not the same as predictable

The obvious objection is that these cars drive gently. Often they do, and riders who brace for a rollercoaster are usually surprised by how calm the average minute is.

But smoothness and predictability are different things, and only one is on offer. Smoothness lowers how much motion your inner ear picks up. Predictability lowers how much of it arrives as a surprise. A robotaxi can beat a human driver on the first and lose on the second, because the machine gives you nothing to read: no posture, no hesitation before a turn. It decides and executes, and you find out when your body does. If you have never checked how sensitive you are, the motion sickness test puts your susceptibility on a percentile instead of a guess.

Where riders are allowed to sit, and why it matters

Read the operator's own help page rather than a forum, because this is where the rumours are. Waymo's rider rules say the driver's seat is off limits and you are free to sit in any available seat, up to four riders in total, with your seat belt on for the whole trip. Its seating page makes the front passenger seat available to any rider at least 8 years old, and asks you to bring and fit your own child seat below that age. Policies differ by operator and by city, and they change, so check the service you actually book.

The front seat matters for one reason: it has the windshield in front of it, the earliest view of the road ahead anywhere in the vehicle. Which seat wins in which vehicle is a longer answer with real ranking behind it, and it has its own page: the best seat for motion sickness.

The in-car screen is the wrong place to look

The in-car screen is genuinely useful: the route, the car's own picture of the street. It is also mounted low and inside the cabin, and Diels and Bos are blunt about the cost. A display sitting at a downward angle makes you look into the vehicle interior, which is exactly the line of sight you need to anticipate the motion path. Their recommendation is the opposite arrangement: put displays near the line of sight out of the window, and keep them small enough that peripheral vision still picks up the direction of travel.

So treat the screen as a setup tool. Set the temperature, confirm the drop-off, then look up and stay looking up. The same goes for your phone, the older version of this problem.

One tempting idea deserves an honest answer. Showing a passenger the path ahead really can help. Diels and Bos point to a 2011 simulator study by Feenstra and colleagues in which passengers rode turbulent aircraft motion, and a rollercoaster-style track of the trajectory to come was drawn onto an earth-fixed visual scene. Airsickness fell by a factor of no less than 4.2. That was a large, world-fixed picture of where the vehicle was about to go, not a route map by your knee, and whether the small version does the same job is still an open question.

What to do on a ride you have already started

If it is building and you are ten minutes from the drop-off, work in this order:

1. Get your eyes on the road ahead. Through the windshield if you can see it, otherwise the furthest fixed point out of a side window.
2. Put the screen and the phone down. Both are the conflict, not a distraction from it.
3. Cool the cabin, use the window. Temperature sits in your cabin preferences in the app and on the in-car screen, and the physical window controls work throughout the trip.
4. Slow your breathing. Longer out-breaths than in, quietly, for a minute.
5. End the ride early if you need to. Waymo's in-car features put a pull over control in the app and under cabin preferences on the screen. The motion stops with it, which is the one thing nothing else on this list can do.
6. Reach for drug-free relief if it has set in. Sound therapy through the headphones you are already wearing is one option, with relief in about 90 seconds, and it works with your eyes closed, which the windshield trick does not.

For the part of the ride you cannot control

Stop the nausea

You cannot ask a robotaxi to drive differently. You can change what you look at, and you can carry a backup. Dizzout is one option: precisely calibrated audio through any headphones, relief in about 90 seconds. Drug-free, no drowsiness. Free to download on iOS and Android, subscription for full access.

Try it free

Free to try, no card needed. Or go straight to the App Store or Google Play.

Try 15 seconds in your browser first

Scan to open on your phone

On a computer? Dizzout installs on your phone. Scan the code, or open dizzout.com/get on your phone and it'll take you straight to the right store.

Copy dizzout.com/get

Share this page

Booking a robotaxi when you know you get carsick

None of this is a reason to skip the ride. It is a reason to book it differently:

• Make the first one short. Ten minutes tells you how your body handles it without committing you to forty.
• Avoid stop-and-go where you can choose. Diels and Bos single out the high accelerations of urban and rush-hour traffic as the conditions where self-driving carsickness is hardest to keep manageable.
• Bring whatever already works for you in a car. If that is a medication, ask your doctor or pharmacist about timing before the trip. The common ones are labelled to be taken before travel starts, and the over-the-counter meclizine label says half an hour to an hour beforehand.
• Know the wider picture. The car motion sickness guide covers what changes between vehicles, seats and roads, most of which still applies when the driver's seat is empty.

The bottom line

A driverless car takes away the one thing a passenger was quietly using to stay ahead of the motion: a person doing something you could read. What is left is the road ahead, and for most people that is enough, as long as you look at it.

If you are reading this from the back seat rather than the kerb, skip the theory: the 60-second protocol is the page you want.

Frequently asked questions

Related Articles

Travel Tips

Varifocals in the passenger seat: the glasses problem nobody mentions

10 min read

Travel Tips

Seasick at anchor: why a boat going nowhere still gets you

10 min read

Travel Tips

Does sitting in the front seat really help car sickness?

8 min read