Waymo’s Case for a Driverless Future | Tekedra Mawakana, Sal Khan | TED

Well, great to have you here, Tekedra. — It's great to be here. Thank you so much. — Well, I thought uh before we start, cuz there was I don't know, it seemed like about 40% of the audience who had never had that experience, I thought I would share some of our family videos of our first Waymo ride — uh with my two sons. I also have a daughter, but we kind of split up into two cars. But, if we could play the video. Yeah, start the ride. Yeah. — All right, here we go. — Hello from Waymo. — Hello from Oh my — one minute — This is cool. — Oh my gosh. — Oh. — Are you expecting a child? — Yeah. — We're at the beach. What are we doing? Being driven by a ghost. — Almost there. Don't forget your phone, keys, or wallet. — And sons. Don't forget your sons. — That's great. — So, Tekedra, what's next? I mean, every time I look at the news, I see a new city, I see new models. What's new? — Uh so, we are currently operating in 11 cities. Um we're giving in the US, we're providing 500,000 trips per week. Um and we have the goal by the end of the year to be at a million trips per week. And just to sort of help people wrap their mind around what that means or how to think about it, our fleet of vehicles is about 3,000 cars, and we drive so the single Waymo driver drives uh over 4 million miles per week. And so, the way to think about that is a human drives around 700,000 miles in a lifetime, a human who lives sort of the full lifetime. And so this is like six lifetimes of human driving per week. And so we're, you know, really excited. We're also in four airports right now. You can fly in to San Antonio or Phoenix, San Francisco or San Jose and jump in a Waymo, use the Waymo app. It'll take you from point A to point B. And um so it's just we're at this point where the technology has moved from will it work and can we produce the kind of safety outcomes that we care about to scaling. And so we're really excited and we are also in London and Tokyo. We've moved from manual driving to fully autonomous driving. We still have people behind the wheel, so we haven't launched a service yet, but those will be our first two international markets. — What's the rate-limiting factor? Is it some notion of safety or is it um regulation? What is it? — It really depends. In certain markets, it's absolutely regulation. I think as a when you think about the evolution of this technology as a whole, it's been making sure that we could have the safety outcomes that we want. And all of that is the technology. Like can the driver produce these kinds of outcomes? You know, we've driven over 200 million miles in our time and based on 170 million miles of data, you know, we are now reducing 13 acts reduction in serious injury-causing crashes over a human and the same amount of reduction as it relates to injuries with pedestrians. So we can now say that we are just over 10 times safer than a human at 170 million miles. And so we that's the kind of superhuman performance that we were seeking in order to then be able to scale this technology. Now we have markets that are closed, markets that are open and we have to do all of the work with the cities, with the regulators, first responders, everyone in order to advance our technology. So, we're laser-focused on doing that. And the reality is, you know, citizens, consumers, riders, those who've been cut out of the mobility systems in cities, they're demanding and requesting and advocating for us to come. And so, that's a really exciting inflection point, also. — It's worth triply underlining what you just said. Over 10 times safer, at least, based on the current data. We were talking earlier, y'all have already driven this the equivalent of 300 lifetimes. — Yeah. Yes. Yeah. — 240 lifetimes is the Yeah, 240. — And and you do you a Waymo has not caused a death. — That's right. — Knock on wood. And there's an argument There's 40,000 people, roughly, in America every year who die of a car accident. I think in the world it's on the order of a million every year. So, in theory, if this became everywhere, you could be saving 900,000 lives globally. 30 You know, 35, 36,000 lives just in the United States. Why isn't there more

I know y'all are growing maybe as fast, but why not roll out as fast as possible? What what's what's stopping that from happening? — I think we are now focused on rolling out safely, um as quickly as possible. There is an adoption curve that has to happen, though, right? Like, I think what you're saying is what undergirds our entire company, which is like safety is urgent. You know, saving lives, if this technology can perform at this level, then we have a responsibility to figure out how to do it. Doesn't mean, though, that we're not being met with opposition. And so, we also we have the burden of making those policy makers who are not welcoming us with open arms, you know, we have to demonstrate our safety record. So, we have a safety hub, you know, we make all of this data transparent. We hand it to researchers so they can make their arguments and so it's been really fun lately to watch different sectors of the economy start to talk about how powerful this technology is. You know, we have Dr. John Slatkin, a neurosurgeon, who has just calculated that, you know, 900 billion to 1. 25 trillion could be saved if our technology was rolled out if every car on the road was a Waymo. But this is the problem. People are really comfortable with the number of people who die on the roads. 40,000 people dead, 1. 2 million globally, and avoidable in many cases isn't something upon which we share collective outrage or even moderate discomfort. And so we have to introduce sort of that reality in order for the technology to be viewed as solving a problem that society currently faces because we've just accepted it. Why? Because we don't experience these as 747s falling out of the sky every day. But that's what it would be if we actually experienced it as mass casualties. We experience it, you know, this person's mom, that person, you know, my uncle. And so because of that we sort of have to remind people that the status quo is totally unacceptable and it's even more unacceptable when you have technology that could help address it. — Yes, definitely. — A couple of I think it was a couple of months ago, you would know it much better, I saw a headline, you know, it was a very click-baity headline, uh Waymo hits like an 8-year-old uh outside of a school. And I was like, "Oh my god. " And I I click on it and then they describe what happened and it was outside of a school and there was a car parked and if I remember correctly, there's a kid, he just darted into the street. And the Waymo, everyone who was observing that, assumed the kid was going to die cuz he just darted into a street where traffic was coming. And the Waymo, I don't know what the reflexes are, you probably know the numbers, it just immediately came to a stop and it hit him at like 4 mph or something. Like he literally just fell on his knees, brushed it off, and looked at the Waymo kind of weird. And then Why isn't you know, there's a lot of it's convenient. I mean, we it's you feel like you're in the future. It's What why isn't the safety? I mean, it feels like that message. Is that something that you might want to lead with because that seems like such a clear value proposition. — Yes. — Yeah, I mean, you know, I think what you're saying is how comfortable are humans with this technology being better drivers than humans. You know, it goes back to the status quo. There is people don't generally view themselves or their neighbors or their friends or everyone they know as unsafe drivers. Even when they're distracted, drunk, tired, and angry, we just kind of accept that that's the human condition. And so I think, you know, in the case of the child in Santa Monica, I mean, for us the our car was traveling 17 mph. Um and we were able to get to 6 mph before making contact. Obviously, we want to make no contact, but we know that was superhuman performance. And as so many of the bystanders said after observing it, like the child would not have survived is what we were told. We weren't obviously there. Those moments actually cause entire communities to think differently about this technology. And so that's a we, you know, to your point, it's clickbaity. And on the other hand, it actually demonstrates what superhuman performance is. — Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I actually I assume most of the people I know are not good drivers. I'm the biggest backseat driver. — The economics of the industry, y'all are the first mover. Obviously, uh there's a Tesla robo-taxi. They've taken some different approaches. Uh you have uh many other competitors. Amazon's coming into it. How are you thinking about the competitive space? What do you think's going to happen to the economics of it? I mean, it's already cost-competitive with a typical ride-share drive. — Yeah, I think, you know, right now for

us, we're the only company operating at this scale. We think it's really important to just kind of stay laser-focused on that. You know, the way to think about it, because everyone's calling everything either autonomous or robo-taxi or And so, the way we think about it is if you do not need a driver's license to be in the car by yourself, which is for many, many people who do not have a driver's license, it's their first time ever in life. And so, those are very special moments. Um but if you do not need a driver's license to be in a Waymo to get you from point A to point B, that is fully autonomous, what is referred to in the geeky sense, level four and level five. If it is anything less than that, if you have to be behind the wheel, take over when there's a beep, when there's a anything, that's level three or level two or level one. And it's really important for people to internalize this distinction, because what we found back in 2012, when we had sort of a super cruise capability, the Waymo driver was at that ability, we could go from ramp to ramp, no problem. But when we got to surface streets, you needed to pay attention, and we told employees, "This is early days. When we go from ramp to ramp, we have a camera in the car. This was just for employees. We need you to pay attention. " And people immediately unplugged from the driving task, and they started shaving and curling their eyelashes, and they were like picking up things from the back seat and plugging things in. And so that's when we decided, you know, cars have gotten safer over the years, right? They've gotten airbags and seatbelts and all of these things as a result of a lot of deaths. But what hasn't gotten safer is a human. And so we decided we're patching around the problem. Actually, the way to make sure that this multi-ton vehicle is not as dangerous is to actually let humans be humans. Be distracted, make your phone call, do the thing you want to be doing. Let the Waymo driver get you from point A to point B. And so when you ask me about competition, I think there are a host of companies that are in the level two plus and level three, they need an attentive human after inviting the human to be inattentive, to be the most attentive at the moment when being most attentive is least convenient. And so that to me is not that is still patching around the problem. Doesn't mean it won't result in safer driving when you are attentive, but it isn't actually level four autonomy. — Yeah. I mean if you extrapolate all of this, how much do you all think about what the world is going to look like just because of this? Maybe just because of you all and some of the other players, 10, 15 years. What will it look like? I mean is there a world that you mentioned if you don't have a driver's license, could this be a replacement in some ways for traditional public transportation? How are our roads different? Are parking lots going to turn into parks? What's going to happen? — Yeah, we've partnered from the early days with transit. We think it's a really interesting way to take some of the congestion out of the city, have sort of the kiss and ride from the suburbs in, have people take Waymo rides. We've gotten really favorable sort of reviews in the reports that have been done there. We've also partnered with people who take public transit in LA. You know, we've offered discounts if you do public transit to a Waymo or vice versa. You know, we want to think about the ways that this could become part of that fabric. Because we think it's important that this is also very accessible to a lot of people. So, that's one. But, when we think about 10 to 15 years from now, it's really fun to think about parts of cities that would get recaptured. You know, space right now where cars are just sitting all day. People are at work, the cars are just sitting. Most of those parking lots in major cities around the world are central. And so, the idea that could get recaptured. There are city planners who've reached out to us to try to understand, you know, do we have to make these investments for the next 10 or 15 years or can we start imagining a world where parking structures could move out, parks could come back, community life could sort of come back to the center of a city. So, that's a vision. I mean, who knows, right? I think some of this is as the technology rolls out more and more, I think people's imagination actually starts to get sparked in ways that are very exciting. I said to you before, it's like in some ways people go from, you know, is it safe kind of to your poll, right? Is it safe? Should I get in? Okay, I got in. It's kind of boring and amazing. I really like it. Oh, this is kind of not a big deal. Now, I'm going to be the coolest person I know in my friend group. And then all of a sudden, it's like, "Oh, what could I do in this thing if it got really exciting? " So, I

get pitched on like, "You should make it a yoga studio. " You know, on wheels. — that was what was pitched. I thought this was going in a whole other direction. No, okay. — is my point. Is everyone kind of starts to imagine, "What do I want to do instead of commuting? " So, that's the fun part. — I had a very G-rated thought in a Waymo on the highway on 101. And then I I remembered, but it would have been embarrassing. And then I remembered you do have a camera without sound. So I I didn't even act on my G-rated thought. — Just to be clear, I do not have a camera. — No, no. I was just going to do some grooming type of thing. Jobs. And I you know, I don't see this as something that's your responsibility in totality. But my uncle drives an Uber in New Orleans and I believe that one of the largest jobs for men globally, and not just men, obviously women also drive vehicles, but definitely for men is driving some form of a vehicle, taxis, ride shares, long-haul trucking, etc. What happens? — Yeah, I think, you know, I'll answer the question a few ways. My uncle was actually a truck driver, too, and that job was really important to him. And and, you know, for better or for worse, it was also a really hard job. Um, and so, I think there's an opportunity and it's going to take like a really thoughtful approach, right? Cuz I mean, I'm sitting here talking about building the world's most trusted driver. And so, it's a really tough place for me to sit in and kind of facilitate the dialogue around it. However, over time, what I am starting to see just from us is there are new jobs being created. So, we have running our fleet, we have fleet technicians who we need, fleet operators, as well as smart depot um, professionals. All of that didn't exist 10 years ago. These are like AV-focused jobs. One, two, jobs that exist today, everyday drivers, we have to hire them, too, in order to validate our software. We have to accumulate miles So, we hire drivers constantly or our partners hire drivers um, in different parts of the world. We also need people who can, you know, take care of our depots, build our depots, EV charging infrastructure. And so, what we've started to see, as we have these partnerships of fleet operators, is they are driving a lot of job growth as we scale. So, this is, you know, we're just too early to be able to really quantify it, but in addition to that, earlier this year, we did a partnership with TechForce Foundation, where we're helping like people who are in school to be mechanics to actually become mechanics of autonomous vehicles, because we think that transition doesn't have to pass anyone by. We just need to be mindful about it. So, that's one thing we're doing. And then in addition, we are doing apprenticeship programs. We're doing one in LA. Um, and we're doing curriculum development with community college, Bronx Community College, City University of New York, because again, there's an opportunity for people to learn the skills that are needed. And then I think, while there's a lot of focus on sort of the jobs, there's also the like small businesses in these places where we're launching, where because Waymo has launched, like in San Francisco our first year, we actually drove $40 million of economic development for local businesses from out of towners, because we were the number one destination for tourists to try out a Waymo, and then to go to a coffee shop and go to a restaurant. And so, I think this is a long conversation. Um, I appreciate you for saying, you know, we're one part of it. We take this serious. We think it's important for us to be focused on it. And we're also really excited when we get to go and talk to folks as they move from logistics into now AV adjacent roles with their current skill set. So, it doesn't all require upskilling. — No, well, we could talk for hours about this. Uh, but thank you so much, Kojo. — Yes. — Thank you so much. That was awesome.