Bloomberg Tech
Special Edition: Waymo co-CEO on the Road to 1 Million Robotaxi Rides a Week
11 Feb 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels, where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made.
And I'm Caroline Hepke in London. We're the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast.
We're up early every weekday, keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world.
We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled, and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going.
From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now.
And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy.
We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break.
So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets, you're hearing it while it happens.
It's smart, calm and to the point.
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Chapter 2: What are Waymo's recent funding achievements and their implications?
You have to check out Waymo. And so we saw so many downloads and so many happy riders while they were here.
Waymo's reputation is growing globally, and we're going to talk about the literal expansion of your operations. But with this funding round, it's a who's who of investors now on the cap table. It's a big raise at a premium valuation. How much of that is sort of setting the pieces in motion to life eventually as a public company?
Is that something that you and Dimitri and the rest of the leadership plan for or is there merit staying as you are now?
You know, we are just laser focused on execution, you know, building Waymo to be financially responsible, operationally excellent, and then make sure we maintain the safety culture. Like that's what we're really focused on.
Having this vote of confidence, as you said, not only from Alphabet, but from our three co-leads from this round and from all of the new investors who decided to join our cap table and the existing ones who doubled down on their belief that this is the right opportunity to fund. And so we just feel humbled. But also, there's a lot to do.
So we're just really focused on making sure that we can scale, focusing on our two first international launches, London and Tokyo, and scaling across the United States.
Let's talk about the growth. A lot of people just want to understand in some of those cities where people are frustrated because the service doesn't exist. What does it take to launch in a city to go from mapping that city through to a full paid commercial service?
Yeah, if the regulatory climate of a city is welcoming, then we can show up and map and launch in a couple of months like we did in Miami. You know, that's a city where, you know, they were welcoming and they were ready and we were ready. And so we showed up, you know, we have a fleet operating partner and we were able to launch quite quickly after we first arrived.
I think in a lot of cities, especially cities that are meaningful from a transportation perspective, we're helping, we're working, engaging with policymakers. You know, we have the burden to demonstrate our safety impact. And so with 127 million miles and 90% fewer serious injury-causing crashes or worse, we have to educate them on that kind of impact. 82% fewer airbag deployments.
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Chapter 3: How is Waymo planning to scale operations across multiple cities?
Of course, you're very closely aligned with Toyota as a partner, almost a national champion for them in the automotive space. But does your hope of launching there go beyond Toyota? Is it enabled by Toyota? And again, we have a lot of viewers in that country who just want to know when
Yes. Yes. When we first thought about Tokyo, Japan, we thought about Tokyo. Right. And when we first thought about Tokyo, we decided to partner with Neon Kotsu and Go. And that's because the cabs are such an integral part of life there.
Culturally as well.
Culturally. Exactly. And so what that's allowed us to do is we have a fleet of vehicles there and the drivers of those vehicles are part of that partnership. You know, they're collecting the data for us. And so they're like helping to usher in this change. There will still be cabs for a long time and there will be an introduction of autonomous vehicles.
Chapter 4: What challenges does Waymo face in expanding to new markets?
And so finding partners, like you said, national champions who can help us navigate not only the regulatory climate, but who already have that trust. of riders and who can help us educate riders that this isn't like something they are not welcoming. It's actually something they're quite excited about, seeing Tokyo become a city of the future from a transportation standpoint.
But that is a market where the rules exist for you to, through partners or otherwise, but to charge a fare and have a real business, even if modest at first.
That's exactly right. And of course, it's something we've helped shape.
Right.
You know, there's most places contemplated drivers around the world, right? I mean, that's the way laws, whether it's 50 years ago or 100 years ago, I mean, they were sort of written to regulate automobiles and automobiles were presumed to be driven by people. And so most places we have to think through what needs to change in the laws. And then if people are willing to work with us on that,
then we work with them to change it. And so in Japan, we have a path forward.
Around the world, the sort of robotaxi race is framed in U.S. companies against Chinese technology companies, right? I think this is something that Waymo and some of Waymo's executives have been kind of candid about this past week in testimony. How do you see that playing out? For example, with Toyota, you have a partner who also in common work with Pony AI as an example.
It's something you must be conscious of. In markets where you want to expand outside of America in particular.
Yes. In general, if there are other companies focused on autonomous driving to make roads safer, we think that's positive. That is a positive thing. We should have competition around saving lives. And so that's a good thing. I think what we don't spend a lot of time thinking about is how everyone is thinking about how to pursue partnerships right now. We're just laser focused on our strategy.
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