Waymo's case for a driverless future | Tekedra Mawakana, Sal Khan
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Cars have gotten safer over the years. Airbags, seatbelts, better engineering. But as Waymo's co-CEO, Takedra Mawakana, sees it, there's one safety problem the world has been patching around for decades. Humans. Nearly 37,000 people died on roads in the U.S. last year. And globally, that number is more than 1 million. and we've just accepted it?
We don't experience these as 737s falling out of the sky every day. But that's what it would be if we actually experienced it as mass casualties. 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.
When most people think about self-driving cars, the first instinct is to worry about whether they're safe. But in this conversation with TED's vision steward and CEO of Khan Academy, Sal Khan,
What safety problem do self-driving cars aim to solve?
Tequitra flips that question. What if the real danger is the status quo? She shares where autonomous driving actually stands today, what's accelerating the rollout, what's slowing it down, and what our cities might look like if we could turn parking lots into parks. That conversation is coming up right after a short break.
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And now our conversation of the day.
Well, great to have you here, Takidra.
It's great to be here. Thank you so much.
So Takidra, what's next? I mean, every time I look at the news, I see a new city, I see new models. What's new?
So we are currently operating in 11 cities in the US. We're providing 500,000 trips per week. 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 over four 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 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 regulation? What is it?
It really depends. In certain markets, it's absolutely regulation.
How does Waymo's technology compare to human driving?
I think 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 13x 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 that's the kind of superhuman performance
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:04–1:03
2
What safety problem do self-driving cars aim to solve?
1:03–4:07
3
How does Waymo's technology compare to human driving?
4:07–5:44
4
What does the current landscape of autonomous driving look like?
5:44–18:53
5
What are the challenges and limitations of autonomous vehicle rollout?
18:53–21:40
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from TED Talks Daily
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