PJ Vogt

Waymo employs what they call human fleet response agents, human beings who can't remotely drive the cars, but who the car can ask questions to if it gets confused.

In Santa Monica, the Waymo called one of those humans.

The human called 911, and this is the strangest part of Waymo's statement.

Apparently, the car then waited at the scene of the accident until the police dismissed it.

That's what we know so far, but there's two federal agencies investigating this crash, and so we'll have a full report in the future.

One problem that's not really captured in the safety data that I've seen is what I'd call troubling edge cases.

You see them in videos on social media.

A Waymo gets stuck at a dead stoplight or blocks an emergency vehicle.

Or an example Timothy gave, Waymos were driving past stopped school buses in Austin.

Timothy pointed to one area where Waymo's not been as transparent as he'd like.

Those human response agents, some of which are based here, some in the Philippines, there's questions about what specifically they do and about how this will all work as Waymo scales up.

We asked Waymo for comment on everything you heard in this episode, especially the recent safety incidents.

A spokesperson said that the data to date indicates that the Waymo driver is already making roads safer in the places where they operate and says that Waymo continues to work with policymakers and regulators to improve its technology.

That's the safety picture so far, which to me, after many months of looking at this and talking to experts, looks pretty good.

As Waymo continues its rollout, other companies are quickly falling behind.

There's other robo-taxi companies like Amazon Zoox.

Uber is back in the mix, not making technology, but partnering with these robo-taxi companies.

And many of those early Waymo engineers are now CEOs of autonomous companies themselves.

Dimitri Dolgov is actually co-CEO at Waymo, but other team members run driverless trucking companies.

Don Burnett is head of Kodiak AI, which has its technology deployed in driverless trucks in the Permian Basin.