Big Technology Podcast - Waymo's Co-CEO on Its New Uber Partnership, Safety, and Driverless Trucking — With Tekedra Mawakana

Episode Date: November 1, 2023

Tekedra Mawakana is the Co-CEO at Waymo. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the company's new partnership with Uber, which is making Waymo's driverless cars available through its app. We also discuss the safety of driverless vehicles, food delivery, Waymo's place within Alphabet, when these cars will drive on icy roads, the potential for driverless trucking, and more. Tune in for a revealing conversion with one of self-driving's top leaders. -- You can subscribe to Big Technology Premium for 25% off at https://bit.ly/bigtechnology Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

Waymo's co-CEO joins us to talk more about a new partnership that the company is making with Uber, and plenty more right after this. LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Waymo Co-Coreo to Kiedra Mao Kana is here with us. We're going to talk about this new partnership, the Google-owned right, uh, autonomous. autonomous company is making with the ride hailing company Uber and plenty, plenty more. We love to get into this stuff. And I have so many questions to ask. So it's great that you're here to Ketra. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Alex. Excited to be here. Yes, great to have you. Okay, let's get into the fact that autonomous driving, if you read the headlines, is a real menace in society. So here's one from October 3rd. The San Francisco Standard tweeted,

breaking, a woman suffered traumatic injuries after being trapped under a cruise robotoxy in downtown San Francisco, Monday night, a fire department spokesperson said. Okay, you click the tweet, you read into the article, you find out the woman suffered those injuries after she was hit by a human driver and then was trapped under the cruise. August 18th, sorry, I'm going to, you know, we'll talk about cruise to begin with, so we won't have to like ask you to explain each incident for Waymo, but a cruise Robotaxy hit a San Francisco fire truck, August 18th. And this is the crew statement. One of our cars entered the intersection on a green light and was struck by an emergency

vehicle. August 15th. Oh, this is actually kind of funny. A cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco. You read the headlines and you'd really think that there's a serious safety problem with these cars, but then you read the stories and you realize actually it's just human drivers causing chaos here. So just explaining you're the co-CEO of Waymo. I would say probably the biggest autonomous driving car company in the world. Why is everybody against your new format? Yeah, thank you for that. I think it's really important to start with safety.

So, you know, I think part of the answer to your question, and you sort of, it was covered in there, is, you know, we are pretty accepting of the state of the roads today, right? I mean, the fact that 43,000 people were killed on the U.S. roads in 2022 alone, I think there is this, because we accept that, which we don't at Waymo, but because we as society accept that, there's then this hyper-sensitive reaction to what happens with autonomous vehicles. But at our company, we really feel like because safety is urgent, we should only be building the Waymo driver to meaningfully, improve safety as well as accessibility and access to green transportation. So we really hold safety as our highest priority. We need people to be able to get safely from point A to point B. And we need to improve the roads overall. And it's not surprising, though, that for a new technology, in the kind of

status quo that we have to receive this kind of scrutiny, because so few people have actually experienced the Waymo driver. And so I think when you take the state of our roads, our complacency about it. And then you don't focus on a company like Waymo where safety is urgent and where we have driven, you know, millions of RO miles and we haven't had any of these sort of incidents. I think it makes sense that there's a lot of consumer confusion. Right. I mean, so you're saying that because people say 43,000 people die because of human drivers a year, they sort of say that's fine. And then, but then because, then there's the freak out here? I mean, it just doesn't seem to make any sense. Like, it shouldn't be, you know, I mean,

we should, in fact, have a little higher tolerance for autonomous vehicles killing people if we're so good with humans killing so many. I don't, I just don't think it's the way that it works. I think there's a lack of familiarity. And I also think it's our job every day in this space to earn the trust of the public. And so, you know, we published a paper on our first 3.8 million R.O. miles with Swiss Re, which is the largest, one of the world's largest reinsurers. The reason we did that, you know, they used 600,000 claims as well as 125 billion miles of human driving. We have to bring to bear the evidence that we have to demonstrate that we're safe. What they were able to establish in a statistically significant factor is that we are safer

than a human driver. That's an important fact for us to be able to be transparent about. I think people being, I think people being unfamiliar with the technology is understandable. I think the question is, how do we bring people along on this journey? And what you started with are some of the worst headlines and the, you know, loudest market and the... This is the conversation, though. It is the conversation that's being had. And it's because our industry has to work to earn it.

that's what we're doing at Waymo. We're working to earn it. We're being transparent. We're putting the data out there. And we're demonstrating that we are safer than a human driver. Okay. How much safer are you than a human driver? Well, that was based on 3.6 RO miles in that study. We're continuing to accumulate miles. So we'll continue to put out more and more transparency around that. But we obviously want to keep going. I mean, we're not we're not resting on our laurels there. in our first million R.O. Miles, we also published a paper demonstrating that we hadn't caused any injuries. And so I just think there's a, there is a need for us to acknowledge, which is why you hear me doing that. We have to acknowledge. People are worried. But you don't have a magnitude, though, of like, yes, it was a study that you referenced, but is there a magnitude of safe, is there a magnitude that the autonomous cars are, are safer than human-driven cars?

Or is it just, like, looking at them side-by-side, you can say this study says that they are safer, but you can't really tell us how much? We are safer, and the only reason I'm not getting into magnitude is because we're continuing to accumulate miles. Okay. And so, obviously, the more miles we have, the more veracity of all the studies that we put forward.

The fact that we are statistically significantly safer than a human driver is huge, because two years ago, people said robots are not going to be safer than human driver. Yeah, I mean, having driven in the car, I do believe that they are, but I feel like Waymo and the whole cause would be better served with getting, you know, more data out there. You know, even though it's continuing to accumulate, it would be good to have more data and actually more transparency around what happens when things do go wrong because it is going to take, you know, you're going to be facing a hostile press, hostile public in some way. I mean, I was just looking at JD Power. they said that only 20% of people are actually comfortable having AV technology tested on roads near them. So there's a significant burden there. And to have, you know, better data and more transparency around this stuff, I think is crucial.

I'm just going to point you to one example. It would be great if you could comment on it. Let's see. So I learned about this after, like, you know, riding in the Waymo's and singing the praises that there was a Robo-OO-WOMO taxi in San Francisco. It was in autonomous mode and it killed a small dog in San Francisco. And that's according to an incident report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles. And it says the incident appears to have been unavoidable based on information provided in the report. Can you shed any more detail about what happened there and how is that actually unavoidable?

I know. I think that is all of the information about that incident. I think when something is occluded and sort of appears in front of the car at the last second, it is unavoidable. Obviously, we take this very seriously. We've gone back in simulation and in real world and assessed it. I think to your prior point around data, you were specifically asking about the benchmark to human driving. But I think that what the Swiss study demonstrated was that 100% of bodily injury claims were avoided. I mean, that's not the question you're asking, but I want to, you know, you're sort of making this point of like, we have to be, we have to bring all the data to bear. You know, 76% of property injury, you know, 100% of personal injury.

I think that the question is, and I mean, I think the question is. what is the data that gives the public confidence. Right. And the reason I like this conversation is you started with what people are most worried about are isolated incidences that are happening at a far lower rate than with human drivers. And so what we know is some of it is about the data, but some of it is also how you enter a community. How much you engage with the community? How much you seek feedback from the community?

And so that's been a huge part of how we enter the community. And so when this incident happened, obviously we were able to reach out to community members and partners and have them understand what happened in the case of the dog. Yeah, I mean, could you imagine a headline every time a human-driven car hit an emergency vehicle or landed in a puddle of cement. I mean, human pedestrians end up in cement more often than these cars do. But it is it is the case. I think you've hinted at it, that there is this sort of man versus machine or human versus robot dynamic. It is so interesting. I mean, why do you, people, and I kind of did a lot about this when I was at BuzzFeed.

It was like one of my like mini beats, which wasn't really official, but I ended up just like fighting robots everywhere I could for our YouTube channels. So I was trying to steal from the DoorDash robot. I took on a football, one of those football tackle dummy robots. and I ended up tearing my handstring, but that wasn't the robot's fault. It's a human problem. And I'll tweak and then it went a few weeks later. But I think that like we do have this and it was interesting because like as you start to see this stuff

make their way onto the streets of San Francisco, people start freaking out. What do you think it is? I mean, is it a jobs thing or is it just a natural fear that people have of anything robotic? I mean, you're in this every day. What do you think the roots of this conflict are? I think it's unfamiliarity. And I actually think it's totally natural.

I mean, the thing I don't know, it's hard to trust. And then people get into a Waymo car for their, even skeptics, they get in the first time, and they have two reactions. One is, the future is here. And two is, what was I so worried about? Like, they start to ask themselves, you know, did I think it was going to be a roller coaster ride? Like, what did I think was going to happen in a car that drives, abides by the law and drives on the road? And so I don't, I'm not super surprised that there's this where there's lack of familiarity. There's this suspicion.

And I think we have to work to earn that trust. Yeah, this is one of the things that this JD Power survey about autonomous vehicles in the roadway started to get into, which is that people actually become much more amenable. to these things once they ride in them. And that certainly happened to me. I mean, the first few seconds that I hopped in a waymo, I was just like, is this thing going to hit the brakes? And then you see it hit the brakes more smoothly and with less jerk than a human driver. And next thing, you're like, I never want to ride in a different car again.

And in fact, it got to the point where I knew the Waymo because of, I guess, the way that your team has programmed them was going to take 10, 15 more minutes to get from point A, than to point B, then an Uber. And to me, that was totally worthwhile. I was like, well, I can sit in this car and it could be on my phone without getting nauseous and that's fine. That's great. That's great. I just would love for you to keep going and explain all the ways that you enjoyed the experience. But no, I mean, I really appreciate that. And I think you've hit on something, which is the, you know, we've had such a big conversation around the technology and it becoming capable of driving itself that we're only starting to have the conversation around

consumer delight. Like, what is it really like to ride in a fully autonomous, you know, ride handling service that gets you from point A to point B with like all your friends in the back screaming at the top of your lungs to your favorite song and not have that other human there that you have to interact with or sort of be polite to. And, you know, it's a very different experience and that's why I say I think it's it's exciting to be rolling it out to more customers, more riders and getting the feedback. It is interesting how it's evolved because or how your experience evolves because at first you're like I'm just in a regular taxi and you know you have like you know volume at a very manageable level conversation to a minimum and then my wife and I like in the

next week we're riding again and I wanted to show my friends a video of what was going on. It was like evening in San Francisco, we put on the EDM playlist. We turned the volume up and we had mini dance party there. And we didn't have anybody else that we were going to annoy, except I guess our friends who got the video from us and they're like, what's wrong with you? No, I mean, you've really hit on something in our early days of introducing music casting. We actually found, we were doing casting for first streaming. And we found that people were so much more likely to take over the music in Waymo than in traditional ride sharing because it's not someone else's car. You know, I don't feel like you're getting in and taking over someone else's space.

It's your space. It's your ride. It's your car. And that's one of the most exciting. And there will be other, you know, over time, we'll have other features and offerings that I think take into account how people feel when they're in their own space. It's not fully your space, though, because there are two cameras, at least two cameras inside the cabin. And I had a moment where I hadn't put my seatbelt on in the allotted time.

I guess I was really getting comfortable with the safety at a certain point. And I got a call from Waymo support. And the guy's like, can you put your seatbelt on? I was like, sure. I was like, is that a sensor? Can you see me? He's like, oh, I can see you. And I like held up four fingers and said, well, how many fingers am I holding up? And he goes, you're holding up four fingers, sir. Are we ever going to get to a point where there's not going to be that type of babysitting in these cars? I don't know. It's a really interesting question.

As you said, it's for safety. I mean, looking in to make sure people have put on their seatbelts, especially when we know that people may be vision impaired, people may be inebriated. I mean, just because you're not driving doesn't mean that there isn't the world around the vehicle. And we want our passengers to be safe. So that kind of post-load check to make sure that you have your seatbelt on, that still feels really important and also it's teaching us something about whether and I'm not talking about

you in particular because I've actually gotten that reminder a few times myself with excitement showing it to her friend and then they're like excuse me can you put your seatbelt on is whether or not people will behave most safely in a car that they perceive to be very safe because we still need people doing the safety things within the vehicle like putting on their seatbelts like not touching the steering wheel. And so I think for now, we're going to keep doing it. We're at the risk of you being surprised by it, which we do tell people in the video, if people listen to it when they first join what to expect. We say there are these cameras and we're not listening to any of your conversations, but if you push the button, we can hear you. I think all of that's really important

for people to start to think about. It is their space and we are going to do what's safe. When you talk about the delight side of things, I wonder if are you watching the developments in the large language model space, the fact that computers are now can really converse with us a lot better? And are you thinking about ways to like make this not only a robo taxi, but kind of like a full-on robot with personality where people can sort of speak to it? And I don't know. Just a thought. Yeah. Yeah. It's not something we're spending a huge amount of time thinking about right now, mostly because.

because we're trying to, I mean, it's so nice. I actually love what you just did because sometimes in my days, I think, how can we move past this major, you know, challenge that we have, which is to make the driver work in every scenario on the roads. And for every rider to feel safe and have a great experience. And then what happens is someone gets in the car and they're like, have you ever thought about? And it's kind of like, that challenge is behind us and we're on to the next thing. So of course, we're always thinking about how to make the experience more delightful, how to interact more with our riders, but nothing specific at this moment. Yeah, you're still trying to figure out how to make this thing be able to navigate an icy road. That makes sense.

So you are announcing a new partnership with Uber, which to me is really interesting because having used your app, like it's actually, it's better than an Uber app. You call it. It doesn't decline. And it tells you the exact amount of time that this car is going to get to you. And it does take a while for that car to reach you. So to me, it would seem like you're actually in a better spot to replace Uber and, you know, use any available vehicle to make sure the car gets to people more quickly as opposed to say, hey, we're going to, you know, it's giving Uber such an advantage to go ahead and work through Uber. So talk a little bit about the partnership. And why the decision to partner with Uber versus just bolster what you have now?

Yeah. So, you know, we think it's really exciting to partner with Uber for a few reasons. One, first and foremost, is there are people who that's where they're going to start every time they want ride handling, right? They're going to open their phone and they're going to go to their Uber app. It's, you know, the way they get around town. And this partnership is specifically in Phoenix. And so it gives us another way to get Waymo Wan. in front of those riders. The writers who haven't expressed a huge interest in autonomous,

they're perfectly fine with ride ailing. So that's an important learning for us. When they're told, they'll have the chance to ride in a way mode, do they take it? Are they excited about it? And do they keep coming back from it? And so that's exciting for us to understand. It's also exciting for them to understand, right? I mean, this is not a business that they're directly involved in. They obviously have other companies on their platform. And so that's what's exciting for us. I think Secondly, and you alluded to this a bit, is, you know, there's going to be a hybrid world out there for a long time. People are going to have multiple apps on their phones. We've seen it already with Uber and Lyft. You know, we want to learn everything we can about what makes this

incrementally more interesting to a rider, especially comparing it to if they come to us directly and if they come to us through the Uber app. And so there are tons that they want to learn. And I'm sure Dara can talk to you about that. There's tons that we want to learn. And it's just exciting to be two companies that are leaders in our spaces that have this willingness to partner and learn in these early days. Definitely shouldn't take it as a signal that we aren't interested in the markets where we haven't partnered doing it all ourselves.

And I agree with you. I mean, we're driving demand. We have satisfied riders in San Francisco. We've, you know, just started rolling out in Los Angeles. So we will definitely find ourselves in both work. world where we will partner and we will go to market directly ourselves. And obviously we're doing that also in Phoenix, staying in market directly as Waymo One. So it's kind of a, you know, it's an evolving time, I'd say, for the space. And you're kind of asking me the end point question,

which is why not go it alone? I think all of this is going to help us determine what that arc looks like over time. Yeah, well, Dara, if you're listening and you want to come on, you're welcome to. And we can talk about the previous conversations we've had about Uber here. Maybe you have a response to those as well. But to me, it's interesting. It's almost like Uber is giving you a chance to experiment here and sort of, you know, you're out of this place where like maybe we want to replace Uber. Maybe we just want to partner with them. And they're like, yeah, why don't you, you know, we'll help you evaluate that. I mean, I can see this becoming a point where, I mean, obviously the stuff is expanding. And this does seem like it's going to come to a point where it's going to be like,

you know, you, you're either going to hail an Uber like a human or you're going to hail an autonomous car. There was no sensitivity there or no hesitance of them being like, well, how can we be sure you're not going to replace us? No, I think partnering is an important part of this ecosystem. I think whether you're talking about autonomy or electrification, everyone's trying to figure out with that in-state looks like. and we're building a generalizable driver. Like the Waymo driver is certainly going to power our own fleet of vehicles first. But we've always said this driver will be made available for other business applications. We've talked about personal car ownership, delivery.

And so to me, it's really smart for a company that's been running a ride-hailing service that needs drivers to think about how to learn what it is like to partner with the Waymo driver. but does it require? And what does that evolution look like over time? So I was speaking with Harry Campbell, who's the ride chair guy. I'm sure you're familiar with him. What he mentioned was we shouldn't expect, even if this stuff takes off, we shouldn't expect a mass unemployment of human drivers or even Uber drivers

because you'll have this baseline, right? The thing about the Uber model is it surges, and you'll have this baseline of autonomous vehicles always online. But you're not going to like spin up. another like a thousand cars in a city during rush hour, and that could be the place where the human drivers step in and take those, you know, high, high-priced fares. Does that sound right to you? I would agree, but for a slightly different reason. I mean, we're just talking about, forget about Uber and Waymo. It's just a fixed fleet versus, you know, a flex fleet, right? And

there you're surging prices and you're bringing drivers out of their homes or into their gigs. And here, we're actually managing a fleet of vehicles that have the Waymo drive around them. So I think what he says is right. It's just the economics and the physics of those two business models. I think our goal, though, is to have the right-sized fleet for a market to be able to meet the demand where it is. There will be peak and off-peak, and we don't have to pay drivers during off-peak to drive around. And so it's just a very, so I think it's a slight oversimplification of what I think are two

very different business models. We won't be paying people when they don't have a fare. There isn't a person in the car. The car can park and not be driving. So the deadhead miles are a lot fewer. And for us, obviously, fleet optimization utilization is key, very different than when you can search. You mentioned that you're trying to build forever use case, including personal ownership of these vehicles. And that does boggle my mind a little bit because I couldn't imagine why you'd want to own one of these cars if you get to a state where I open up the Waymo app and I hit hail and it just shows up to me within three minutes. I mean, what would be the possible justification of wanting my own car if I'm able to do these rides with you? Yeah, I think the,

you know, vast majority of vehicles, vehicle miles traveled globally are still with people who own their cars. And so while I agree with you and I think there's huge benefits, And I also think there's a lot of room here for us to usher in a whole new group of people who haven't thought about not owning cars in the way that you just described. But I still think there's a huge number of people who want to own cars. And that's okay. And for those people, they should have access to the safest driver or the safest technology available. And so we think of that as like our longest, longest, longest lead bet.

But also automotive companies are interested in having access to this technology. And we have in the past announced partnerships where we would explore this with OEMs. And we think that's, you know, important as they think about their future roadmap, positioning ourselves to be a partner to them. Okay. That'll be interesting. I mean, it'll be, I think part of the reason why people like to own cars is they like to drive them. So if you don't drive them, I don't know. We'll see.

Do you do you did, so you also mentioned delivery. This is also, you know, in some ways, become Uber's bread and butter. Did you have to make any, like, promises to them that you wouldn't get into delivery in Phoenix if they let you do the cars? Or was there any discussion on that front? No, actually, our agreement includes delivery. So we're also going to be testing some of the Uber-Aids delivery with what on our platform or on their platform with our vehicles. And again, that's, you know, we've done this in San Francisco. I see your expression.

We've done this in San Francisco. we had a deal with Albertsons, and we did delivery with Safeway stores. And as you can imagine for us, it's figuring out, like, will people come out of their houses to get the food out of the car? You know, is that extra step compelling or prohibitive? And we learned that it's not prohibitive. It's actually really interesting to people. And I think, you know, people who are mindful of sustainability want an EV bringing, you know, their groceries and their food to their home. And they also don't hate the idea of not interacting with a human, not tipping was one of the areas that we've heard.

And so I think there's an opportunity there for us to learn with Uber too. Yeah. So they all get a notification and they kind of walk out, open the door and there's their food sitting in the backseat. Yes. That's interesting. What happened with the Albertson's? Yeah, it was great. It was fantastic.

A lot of people in the city really like, yeah, it was a. set time frame. Oh, so why didn't it renew? Why did it not renew? Um, it was just the plan to do it and learn. Yeah, it wasn't, there was nothing bad happened. That was, that was the plan of record. Um, and it could, you know, TBD. No, I was just saying nothing prohibits us from doing others in the future. Yeah, I saw it was your last LinkedIn post and you haven't posted since then. It's been like two years. So I was just like, all right, maybe this was to key. You're just saying, well to hell with it. I'm not going to post it. No, I've posted it. It's my featured is what you're talking about. Oh, it's your, about your featured post. Okay, sorry.

No, no, I apologize. I regret here. No, it's okay. All right. Maybe if the LLMs, you know, kind of say, you know, talk to people and they say, hey, I'm here with your package. Anyway, I think it's interesting. All right, let's take a break. We're here with Takeda Moana. She's the co-CEO of Waymo talking about autonomous driving, talking about their new partnership with Uber. And the second. second half, we're going to talk about how this company fits into Google itself, its scaling operation, and some of the other fun questions you might want to get to, like how they feel about Elon Musk and when they're going to drive on snowy roads, back right after this.

Hey, everyone, let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than two million professionals read the Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for the Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Kijima O'Kana, co-C CEO of Waymo. So I just want to start with a question about how this fits in.

to the Google mix because to me it's kind of been this thing where people have like wondered like why Google's gotten into this. And of course it became started with a famous story about how this began with interest from Larry and Sergey about how this is, you know, going to be revolutionary new technology. I agree with them. It really is. But then the question is like, why does it fit with Google? And I think like kind of like the fun answer that I've heard from people around the company has been that Google really is. is a company that knows your intent, and then it's able to make money based off of that. Like, you drive and search, you put it in drive, you type and search, you know, where can

I buy a Mazda, and then Google will show you the Mazda dealerships, and those Mazda dealerships will pay a lot of money because they know, hey, you're intending to buy a Mazda. When you put your location in, it's the most well-honed signal of intent, possibly, because you're not thinking about buying that Mazda. You're driving to the Mazda dealer. And that is some extremely valuable data if you're a search company. Keter, can you talk a little bit about that? Is that super way off or, you know, what, how should we think about that?

Yeah, so WEMO actually spun out of Google at the end of 2016, which is around the time that I came. And so I think I can't really speak to that sort of. But you're under the alphabet. umbrella. Yeah. So within the alphabet umbrella, but I say that because at that point, it was really our opportunity to figure out what this generalizable driver could become and then what the business models are that it could drive. And so I in my almost seven years here have really not spent a lot of time in that Google ethos of what made Google the amazing access to information, sort of platform and company that it is, nor have we at Waymo spent a lot of time thinking about ourselves that

way. So it's fun for me to hear you sort of say this because I think it's more the other part of the founders is what I would say, which is that part of them that set up X and said, okay, we've succeeded at something amazingly. What are the other things technology could tackle that are actually challenges that humans face. And in this case, it was like unsafe roads, like unnecessarily unsafe roads. Distracted drivers, angry drivers, drunk, tired drivers. And so that's really been our focus is how do you build a driver that gets smarter and smarter and smarter over time? And that can safely move people from point A to point B. So that to me has been the genius of what the founders thought about. And this kind of moonshot opportunity of,

being at Waymo and using technology to improve people's lives isn't like something that people talk about a lot, especially not when people talk a lot about big tech. Like the big tech for good is, I mean, to me, this is really a great example of that. So that's what I would say. That's what motivated me to join. Again, I came after the spin out. So maybe I had a slightly different orientation to the company from the beginning. So Google built this exceptional business because it matches that intent with advertisers and allows them to pay to reach people while they're in intent mode and pay when they click. It's extremely high margin business. It's worked out very well for Google. Waymo is a hardware business. It has software in the core, but there's a hardware

cost there. Talk a little bit about the business opportunity long term. Does this have the opportunity to become a business like as big as Google or where do you see it going? Yeah. So I think, yes, if you look at the map of vehicle miles traveled globally, it's a massive, massive opportunity ahead of us. It's not going to be like, as you said, the same kind of business as a Google business because it is a capital intensive business. But everyone putting cars on the road are accustomed to that, right? Everyone putting cards on the road are already working. working in hardware or working in not just capital intensive, but much longer lead time businesses. And so we sit at this interesting intersection between software, which is six-week or four-week release cycles and automotive companies, which have these four-year, and we're learning so much about how you integrate both of those. And so I think the sweet spot of the future is this owned and operated kind of ride-haling business, local delivery business, and then

personal car ownership and and I should say we also are still you know working on building a redundant trucking platform you know we announced that we weren't we're not focused on trucking right now because we want to focus on ride handling but the only way we've gotten to ride handling is by having a platform a vehicle platform that has redundant braking redundant steering and redundant compute power what does redundant mean in this example so in the without a human there, what's the backup system? Because normally in a car, you and I are the backup system. Right.

And so we have a deal with Daimler trucks where we're building this redundant platform for trucking. And so that'll come back into focus for us. Really? It's just not what we're focusing on now. So on that platform, there's going to be, it will be totally autonomous or it will be really? Yes. So you said not right now. What's like the timeline on that?

Well, we're right now completing the redundant platform. That's just not sort of from a commercialization perspective or not as focused on it. Okay. So you put it all together and that is, I mean, it's a massive business. And I think the potential is unbelievable. So can you talk a little bit about the scale that it's at now? I mean, so let's see, October 2021, I was watching an interview with you at the Code Conference and you said these cars had driven 20 million miles.

What's it at now? We stopped reporting that we stopped sharing the public numbers. Mostly because it kind of is like what's the quality of the driving? How many incidents do we, meaning how much learning is the driver getting, not just how many miles is the driver going through. Okay. So the last public number you shared is 20 million? Yeah. Yeah.

I wish you would update that one. Okay. I mean, we say we've driven tens of millions, so of autonomous trials and tens of billions in simulation. We just move from being very precise to less so. Well, I mean, that again goes back to the transparency thing that I think, I don't know, I mean, you're making the decisions on this. So, but in a moment where so many people are going to be against, I think more information

is better than less. One thing you are talking about is the number of cars. And as of September, you had 700 cars on the road. Is that the case still today? Yeah, that's about the size of our fleet now still. And I just want to challenge the point you're making about transparency. I mean, what we say is we're building the world's most experienced driver. Right.

And what I can tell you, and I'm sure it was your experience to you, is, I mean, every 16-year-old did not spend tens of millions of miles on public roads becoming. an experienced driver before they got a driver's license. And so I don't think the number actually changes how people think about it. And that's the, you know, that's the reason we're not focused on telling you every precise number. What we want to do is demonstrate the impact of that driving, which is why earlier when you asked me about, you know, the impact, having 100% of bodily injury claims disappear, that's the kind of impact that we want to have. in this driving but it's good i know what you're saying is you know there's a little bit of impatience it takes a while to get to those outputs but we are more interested in demonstrating the outputs

and these miles are the inputs for that yeah well i will challenge you back and make the point that it is a technology problem but it's also a socialization issue that you are in the middle of which is like i shouldn't be lecturing you on it because you know this um so maybe i'm not seeing the complete picture. But I do know that there's going to, and I'm rooting for this technology, but I also know that there's going to be quite a large pushback. You see it in the headlines in San Francisco. You're going to see it in Congress. And I think that the general public, you know, will be more likely to be able to evaluate this better if they see the numbers. But I do think, okay, anyway, we could debate this forever. But, okay, so 700 cars on the road. How, how, how

long does it take you? Okay, so let me tell you something that Kyle wrote, the CEO of Cruz said when he was here a few months ago. He said that this is going to 10x every year, the amount of miles driven and the amount of cars. Are you seeing the similar, are you, do you have similar plans?

And, you know, as far as growth goes with Waymo? Yeah, I don't, I've learned over the last seven years not to predict. And it's for two reasons. One is, I think this is a product of discovery. It has been. We have thought things that did not actually go on the arc

that we thought. And in some cases, it's moved far faster. Adoption, understanding, once people are in the car, how many times a rider comes back, all of that. So no, I wouldn't say what he's saying. And then secondly, I think it goes back to the point you were just making. Like, we have to be able to bring the public along with us. And, you know, you're in New York, so you're not here. We're doing a lot to do that in San Francisco, in Phoenix, in Los Angeles. You know, we don't just show up with our cars and hope for the best. We start engaging. We start engaging with public safety officials. We start engaging with policymakers at every level, regulators, community groups. You know, we have an entire sort of way that we enter our market and that we

receive feedback to actually make sure that the product is meeting the needs of the community, et cetera. And so I think that approach is a traditional product approach, which is not one that we're taking where I can sit here and tell you how many times we're going to X everywhere without regard to what happens in each of those markets. No, that's definitely. Yeah, that makes sense. And I will say that even though I'm in New York, I was in San Francisco from 2015 and 2021. I watched a lot of this conversation go down and continue to follow it. So, yeah, I see what you guys are doing. The car costs, people estimate that these cars cost $250,000 per car to outfit.

Is that ballpark where it is? And I mean, I'll tell you, like, I was taking the rides in San Francisco, and it was like, my rides were less than Uber rides, $12, $15. How is it possible that a car can cost that much? And the rides can be so cheap. cheap unless you're losing money on that. So we don't break out the car costs. So I'm not going to get into those.

But I mean, I think that question you're asking, which I fully understand is, is our current pricing strategy, our long-term pricing strategy. We do think of our service as a premium service. And we are in the early days, especially in San Francisco, of just having people move from our wait list. into our service. And a lot of them expressed an intent to ride, you know, months ago because we had a wait list for so long.

And so over time, you will see us have more dynamic pricing. It depends on the time of the day. It depends on the length of the trip and the day of the week. And so you will see our dynamic pricing evolve. When Waymo first began, it was this like little, it kind of looked like a clown car. that would go around the Google parking lot. And then it obviously expanded to a bunch of different cars, including these great Jaguars that are Waymo cars in San Francisco.

There is this freedom that you get when you are able to get these systems right, where you don't have to shoe a horn them into traditional vehicles. So was that on the roadmap for you to sort of build a vehicle that lets you rethink what it's like to be in a car? Because you don't need so much of what exists today, like a steering wheel or brake pedals? Yeah, I think removing the human controls is like a regulatory process. Yeah, you'd have to like basically build ground up.

Yeah. And so we're not focused on that. We do partner with automotive companies. We think they're really good at building cars. We're really good at building the driver. So we've decided not to do that. The car you're talking about are a little firefly. We retired.

And it sits in a few museums around the world, which is fun. and in our office. But we don't plan to do that again. Speaking of others that are trying to get into this, what's your read on Apple? I mean, they've been trying to do it forever. Why haven't they released anything? Yeah, I have no read on Apple.

And we'll see what they end up doing. No, no, what they're doing over there. Yeah. Well, I don't know if they do either. So, okay. Anyway. How about driving on the freeway? I feel like that's crucial.

Yeah, I think it's really important. And it's also when we were doing our sort of class eight trucking, I mean, that was a lot of our freeway driving has come from that. We had routes between Arizona and Texas, as well as routes within multiple cities in Texas. The reason I bring that up is because it's the same driver. It learns no matter which vehicle platform it is. And so most of our freeway driving was geared towards long.

haul delivery. Now we're obviously doing it for passenger movement too on the I-paced vehicles. So we view freeways as essential for ride hailing. Obviously, people are used to hailing a ride at an airport and jumping on a freeway, getting to the city or whatever, wherever they're staying. So that's definitely not a road map. Okay. And are you testing on the freeway right now? Not with riders. Not with riders. Okay. But you have, are you testing with, so you have safety drivers in the cars? Are you testing without safety drivers on the freeway? Not in, not on this vehicle platform in San Francisco, but in prior vehicle platforms in Arizona. Yes. Okay. That's cool. Yeah, I'm excited for that. I think that's going to be. I mean,

it really, I mean, in the U.S. in particular, you need freeway. We are a freeway nation. Exactly. Exactly. How about snow, ice, rain? Where is the drive? right now in terms of its ability to handle that. I'm asking somewhat selfishly because I'm like, you know, having spent a week, just a week riding Waymos in San Francisco, I'd like, you know, it just happened to go inside at the time where my car died and I was just like, it's okay. It lived a very nice long life. I was like the 10th owner of it anyway. But I kept thinking, okay, maybe, you know, I don't have this, but maybe one day we can get these Waymos in.

New York City. So obviously much more challenging driving conditions, both because of the weather and the drivers. So what do you think about that? Yeah. So I would separate rain. We've had quite a bit of rain in San Francisco this year. And we're able to drive in rain. Our service is up in the rain. We drive in the rain. We can see in the rain. It's actually really exciting because that was not the case. Three years ago, we would talk about rain quite a bit. And now it's these newer software releases of the way more driver just really solved those challenges, which is great. I mean, you know, it's like you have windshield wipers. We have them on the cars because it's a standard car, but having them on the LIDAR and having them on the cameras is what really matters.

So that's been great. I think ice and snow, we've tested. We haven't actually deployed in a city with those, but that's part of why we go out and do these tests. We've been in New York doing tests. That's part of it is weather. Same thing. We've been in Detroit and tested in snow. And so we're not, it's not early on our roadmap that we will be launching or deploying a service, but you'll see us continue to show up in markets where we're including this data and what the Waymo driver has to learn. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Well, I wish you luck. I hope it works in New York somewhat soon. Yeah. So can you just give me like an, or give us all an assessment of like what market you're in now, what expansion looks like? I mean, you mentioned

already that the driver is generalizable, meaning that, you know, the kind of the biggest hurdle is getting it to work in one place, and then you can sort of take that technology and apply it elsewhere. So what's the state of Waymo today? Yeah, the state of Waymo today is, you know, we are in downtown Phoenix all the way out to Scottsdale and Tempe, which is really exciting because we have a lot of ASU students who use the vehicles. And then we're at the San Francisco, we're at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, which to us is really exciting because you can fly in, download the app. It's completely open public service and then go downtown or go wherever it is that your conference or golf tour or whatever that takes you to

Phoenix. So that's that's 225 square miles, the largest, the only 24 by 7 public service. It's been open since October of 2020. It's a real point of pride for our company and sort of surprising that most of the world still doesn't know that this exists. That's huge. It's been up and for three years. Yeah, and it's also 2225 square miles. That's up from 50 square miles, I believe, in October 2021. So talk about scale.

I think we finally got a view of how the expansion looks. Okay, but so you have Phoenix, you have San Francisco. We're starting to test in L.A. And we started testing in L.A. We're doing our L.A. tour, and we've also announced that after we are up and going

in L.A., we will move towards Austin. okay so eyeing four markets yes new york before or after 2025 um tbd okay uh what do you think about i mean new york is obviously an extremely important market so good that's awesome yeah we need that stuff it's uh crazy to drive in the city and even worse to be a pedestrian so yes uh Elon uh he okay i'll ask you some specific questions i feel like that's probably better way to go. Full self-driving. I mean, this is something that came up when I spoke with Kyle about how he believes that full self-driving is a misnomer and it's not full self-driving. It's

effectively what he said is it's full self-babysitting of the Tesla as it drives. Then I had some Tesla super fans come in and talk to me about how, you know, Kyle was wrong and actually Elon's getting it done. He's collecting a ton of data. When you see, these Teslas in full self-driving mode and full disclosure, I mean, I drove in, you know, the full-celled driving mode. And it seemed fine. It wasn't anywhere close to a Waymo service. But I'm kind of curious how you think that they stack up and whether Elon's helping or hurting. I think it doesn't help to describe anything inaccurately in these early days. I mean, we're teaching the public. So let's just be explicit.

Right? There's, SAE has already defined levels of autonomy. There's, you know, goes from one to five. That's driver assist technology. It's level two plus. I think, you know, the Waymo driver is level four. I think it's just important for us to do you need to be behind the wheel and do you need a driver's license? If you need to be behind the wheel and need a driver's license, it's level three, two or one. If you don't, it's four or five. I think if we can just all level set on that, then it kind of doesn't matter. Like how many times did the thing deep and it's just more can you afford to take your eyes off the driving task not unless it's a level four or above and that's a decision we made back in 2012 we were running autopilot but do you think do you think Tesla can evolve into level four from where it is today given the technology and the data that is collecting I don't have enough insight um I think there's been enough statements that that's their plan that there's no reason for me to to think it's not their plan. But I don't know, like, what the technological roadmap will look like.

Yeah. It doesn't seem like it's, it's, it just seems like he's focused on making it happen at some point. Yeah. All right. Let me end with this. We started this conversation with the conversation of safety. You mentioned 43,000 people in the U.S. alone die in traffic, uh, accidents where

humans are behind the wheel. I'm, I really am curious about your recruiting. I mean, who are the people that staff Waymo and how many of them come to you with stories where they're really trying to solve this problem? Because someone that they know or they love has been impacted and lost their lives or been injured or been behind the wheel in one of these accidents. Yeah. I think we're very fortunate to be able to hire the brightest people, right? The brightest minds, brightest engineers, brightest markers, brightest, you name it. people choose to come because they want to do something that they feel connected to and they feel

tied to this mission and when I spend time with people we have this thing called why why waymo why do you waymo um it's usually a deep personal story the loss of a family member when they were a child or or frankly like a parent who's still alive but not capable not fully able body because of an accident or crash. And so people come because of the mission. And they also come because they're like really trying to figure this thing out. Like it's exciting, but it's also like very complicated. And so people are like, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the mission is exciting. But really, I also want purpose-driven hard work. All right. Well, Takeda, let me tell you. I think that I've had a few holy shit moments in my life using technology or seeing the introduction of new technology

to the iPhones, one of them, chat GPT, another, and hopping into a Waymo this summer and seeing what it does is right there with them. So a fascinating conversation. Thank you again. Thanks for willing to come on here and be pressed on some of the issues and give us some more insight on the others and wishing you the best. This is one of the technology products where I think that if it works, You know, it's no conflict of interest to say that we're rooting for it. I certainly am, and I'm looking forward to following the progress. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Alex.

Really appreciate it. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Nate Gwattany for handling the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. Thanks to all you, the listeners. Always great to have you here week after week.

We'll see you on Friday for a news recap with Ron John Roy. We're going to talk about a busy week of news, so we hope to see you then. and we look forward to seeing you next time on big technology podcast.