Chapter 1: 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,
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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 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 the equivalent of 300 lifetimes.
Yeah, 240 lifetimes is the, yeah.
And Waymo has not caused a death.
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Chapter 4: What does the current landscape of autonomous driving look like?
That's right. Knock on wood. That's right. 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. You could be saving 35,000, 36,000 lives just in the United States. Why isn't there more?
I know you all are growing maybe as fast, but why not roll out as fast as possible? What's stopping that from happening?
I think we are now focused on rolling out safely 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 have the burden of making those policymakers who are not welcoming us with open arms we have to demonstrate our safety records. So we have a safety hub. 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. We have Dr. John Slotkin, a neurosurgeon, who has just calculated that 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 737s 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. I think it was a couple of months ago. You would know it much better. I saw a headline. It was a very click-baity headline. Waymo hits an eight-year-old outside of a school. I was like, oh, my God. I click on it, and then they described what happened. It was outside of a school, and there was a car parked. If I remember correctly, there was a kid. He just darted into the street.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges and limitations of autonomous vehicle rollout?
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 L.A.
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 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. I appreciate you for saying, you know, we're one...
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, but thank you so much. Thank you. Yes. Thank you so much. That was awesome.
That was Takedra Mawakana in conversation with Sal Khan at TED 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tansika Sangmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Balarezo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
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