Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO, Waymo: Autonomously driven vehicles are here
People have been buzzing about the promise of fully autonomous vehicles for years. But using self-driving cars in our everyday lives was something that we could only imagine existing in the distant future. No longer. Autonomous driving is here, and people are already using it to get to the mall, send their kids to school, or get dropped off at the airport. Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company owned by Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet, has deployed a fleet of autonomously driven cars in cities like Phoenix and San Francisco that anyone can order from the Waymo One app -- just like you would with any ride-hailing service. Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo\u2019s co-CEO, joins the podcast to discuss Waymo\u2019s moonshot mission to solve \u201cthe greatest engineering challenge of our generation\u201d and how autonomous driving technology is giving people freedom of movement while making the roads safer for all. She also gives an inside look into how Waymo is rolling out the autonomous service, city by city, using insights from early users to improve the Waymo One experience. \n\nListen to this episode to learn:\n\n\u2022 Lessons from early users who are co-creating new use cases for autonomous vehicles\n\n\u2022 How the Waymo Driver technology makes the roads safer by removing human error \n\n\u2022 How visually impaired testers have inspired enhancements to the Waymo One app\n\n\u2022 The challenge of navigating consumers\u2019 expectations versus the realities of what the technology can do\n\n\u2022 How launching Waymo in different types of cities, with vastly different topographies and road conditions, is advancing the learnings of Waymo Driver and enabling it to scale much faster