Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO, Waymo: Autonomously driven vehicles are here by Outside In with Charles Trevail

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’s 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’s co-CEO, joins the podcast to discuss Waymo’s moonshot mission to solve “the greatest engineering challenge of our generation” 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.

Listen to this episode to learn:

• Lessons from early users who are co-creating new use cases for autonomous vehicles

• How the Waymo Driver technology makes the roads safer by removing human error

• How visually impaired testers have inspired enhancements to the Waymo One app

• The challenge of navigating consumers’ expectations versus the realities of what the technology can do

• 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