The parking lot at the Walmart on West Chandler Boulevard is packed as the sun wanes on Chandler, a languid suburb of Phoenix. I’m here to see robot cars, the kind that the putative leader in the technology, Waymo, has been testing in the area since 2017. This summer, the company announced a partnership with this Walmart, a deal that allows select locals to preorder groceries and hitch a ride to and from the store with the company’s sensor-clad minivans, which still mostly have safety operators behind the wheel.

Indeed, I spy two spots for the robotic minivans. “Waymo,” a sign mounted on a cheery azure stand reads. “Reserved: Passenger Pickup.” And parked in those spots are two very normal, non-Waymo cars, put there by regular humans flouting the rules.

During my 32-hour trip to Chandler in mid-November, I don’t see any Waymo Chrysler Pacificas around the Walmart. Yet they are everywhere: motoring down West Chandler and South Chandler Village Drive, pulling off the Loop 101 highway and parked by the fire station. This 250,000-person city hosts Waymo's 68,000-square-foot self-driving depot. So I’m here to see what happens to a place when robot cars show up, as automakers and tech companies have promised they will in the next few years. I’m looking for the first steps in a takeover likely to unroll over decades.

But mostly I’m bored, and I’m not the only one. Most locals I chatted with say it’s cool the cars are here, and that sometimes they drive too slowly and have trouble merging. That’s about it. “At first, the Waymos were a novelty,” says Micah Miranda, the city’s head of economic development, sitting in front of a picture window inside a City Hall conference room. Chandler—flat, sprawling, in shades of sepia—extends out behind him. “Now they’re just white noise.”

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Waymo chose this corner of the country for a few reasons. “In many ways, Phoenix is the perfect place for us to get started: It’s got wide but complex roads, and it’s a large city with sprawling suburbs that give us a lot of room for growth,” says Dan Chu, who oversees product at the self-driving car company. The streets here are well marked, and the sidewalks rarely traversed by pedestrians. It doesn’t rain or snow. Arizona virtually has no rules governing who tests robocars in the state, or how. (Its governor did suspend Uber's testing last spring, after a self-driving car struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe.)

Although Waymo didn’t need Chandler’s permission to start testing in the city, Miranda says the company’s execs were solicitous and engaged when they first approached the it about their plans. This is how the future rolls in: with conference calls, public meetings, office huddles.

Self-driving cars promise to make roads safer and more efficient, but Chandler’s leaders seem more interested in having Waymo around than its cars. The Google sister company has added to a burgeoning high tech cluster, which already included outposts for Intel, the semiconductor company NXP, and General Motors’ IT innovation division. The locals believe Waymo’s presence has created jobs, though they can’t say how many. Chandler officials also say they’re pleased with how Waymo has dealt with the community on the whole. Reps for the self-driving company have shown up to local science events and the mayor’s State of the City speech.

Fire Chief Tom Dwiggins recalls his first interaction with Google’s futuristic vehicles, which came during a sit-down between company engineers and city officials in 2016. “You think about this technology as a kid,” he tells me. “But now you’re the fire chief in a city of 250,000, and you’re thinking about how to keep them safe.”