The future of driving is autonomous with Dmitri Dolgov of Waymo

Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov is convinced that his company’s vehicles are better at driving than any human. Dmitri has spent thousands of hours riding in them, and recently Guy had the chance to try one out as well... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FONn3uc1_CQ This week on How I Built This Lab, Dmitri recounts the decade-plus journey of building Waymo into the world’s first company to operate a fully-autonomous ride hailing service. Plus, how Waymo’s approach differs from Tesla’s, and Dmitri’s take on when we’ll see more AV’s on the roads than human-driven cars (spoiler: sooner than you may think!) This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella with research help from Chris Maccini. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis/, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:11Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. There's no driver. How crazy is this?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

  It's your first time ever. You're gonna look at this as an adult when all cars are driverless. You're gonna be like, yep, I did this driverless drive with daddy. So it's probably hard to tell from the sound alone, but what you're hearing is audio from a ride I recently took in a Waymo autonomous taxi. My son and I were in San Francisco, heading across the city. These taxis are now all over San Francisco and Phoenix. And yes, there is no human driver. There's no human in the car at all, unless you count me and my son, who are passengers. It's a ghost driver, and if I'm being totally honest... They're amazing. The Waymo Taxi is now available 24/7 in San Francisco and

• 6:00Guy Raz?

  Phoenix, and it operates similar to Uber or Lyft. You pull out your phone, you fire up the app, order the car, and it magically appears within minutes. Except, it's fully autonomous. Waymo was spun out of Google a few years ago, but the project to build autonomous vehicles at Google actually goes back to 2009. One of the engineers on that project was Dmitry Dolgov. He's been with Waymo from the very beginning, and today, he's the company's co-CEO. Dmitry was born in Russia, a child of two physics professors. He went to high school in the US and eventually returned to Russia to attend the Moscow Institute

• 6:39Guy Raz?

  of Physics and Technology. Dmitry then came back to the US to get his PhD. In 2006, he took part in a competition called the Urban Challenge, which was sponsored by DARPA, the US Defense Agency. The idea was to build an autonomous vehicle that could make it through a series of obstacle courses.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And the grand challenge, the grand challenge was to drive 150 miles through a desert, a completely static environment. But until then, robots were not capable of doing that. So it took two tries in 2004 and 2005 to accomplish that. So the next step was, let's make it a little bit more interesting. Let's make the environment dynamic. Let's add some rules of the road, stop signs, other vehicles, but do it in a controlled environment in that mock city. So that was the challenge. And we built a car to do exactly that. We equipped it with a bunch of sensors, lighters, lasers, radars, cameras, a computer, and then wrote software that would allow it to follow the rules, understand and follow the rules of the road, and interact with other dynamic actors, whether human or other robots.

• 7:43Guy Raz?

  So I'm looking at one of the vehicles that you helped put together. It's called the Junior. And so Volkswagen Passat, I think, and I think came in second place.

• 7:58Guy Raz?

  This is like 2007 and was the the the underlying technology basically what we're talking about today? Was it pretty similar or was it like a crude version?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  You know, yes and no. It depends on how you talk about like the big car plus sensors plus computers plus software. You know, that stays, right? But of course, you know, it's what almost 18 years and then everything has changed, right? The sensing technology has gone a very, very long way. Computers have evolved, software, right? All the breakthroughs, especially in AI. So, you know, that that led to many, many breakthroughs in the area of software. So now the system we have kind of has the same components, but you know, all of the components and how they work together is, you know, qualitatively drastically different.

• 8:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah, it's amazing how many, you know, these DARPA challenges, how many sort of self-driving car companies they they spawned. I mean, we've talked to Kyle Voigt of Cruise. He was in, he competed in the 2004 and 2005 challenges. Dave Ferguson of Neuro, which is another company, was part of the Carnegie Mellon team. Chris Urmson, who also is obviously worked with you at Waymo. He was, he's now with Aurora, was was also a part of Carnegie Mellon team. It's amazing how many, like you knew all of these people. And this is, as you say, it was a small community of people working on this huge challenge to basically create vehicles that could be fully autonomous.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. And of course, I worked very closely for many years with Dave and Chris and they're they're great friends. So, yeah, it's a lot of innovation and a lot of companies and progress came out of those early days of DARPA grand challenges.

• 9:48Guy Raz?

  You and Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson, you all went to go work for Google and and you were part of that founding team, which was at the time a secret project, Google's self-driving car project. And At that time, it's amazing to think 2009 because it seems like ancient history now. You were given a charge by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. You had two years to essentially accomplish two things. Do you remember what they were?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember them very well. The first one was to drive 100,000 miles in autonomous mode. That was way more than orders of magnitude, more than what anybody has done at that time. And the second one, and actually that one turned out to be more interesting and much more challenging, was to drive 10 routes. Each one was about 100 miles long. And they were very carefully selected, I think, by Larry and Sergey personally. And they were fairly devious in how they created them to make it interesting. And the goal was to drive each one from beginning to end in full autonomy, so with no human intervention,

• 11:07Speaker 01

  which at that time seemed almost impossible. I remember we had a lot of people, experts in the field, laugh at us when we attempted it.

• 11:17Guy Raz?

  You had two years to accomplish this. I think you guys finished it with three months left. Like you actually, I mean, going into this project, do you remember thinking, we're never going to do this in two years?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  I was actually, maybe naively, but fairly optimistic.

• 11:32Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And it was hard. And they're all different. And yes, there are many moments where we would finish one route and we would think ahead of like, what would it take to do the next one? And we would write some software. We would collect some data and test it and then would actually try it and have, then we would hit a bunch of, oh crap, moments of like, okay, wow, this is way more difficult than we expected, even those early days.

• 12:01Guy Raz?

  So when you did finally accomplish it, were you guys able to have a party and celebrate? Or was it just like, nice job, now we gotta keep it quiet?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yes, both. We celebrated and you know, it felt like it was a big accomplishment. And but yeah, we kept it quiet. But you're like, that's what made it so incredibly fun. I guess, you know, that that phase was one of my favorite phases of the whole project. It's like you the early days of a startup, you're up against what might seem like an impossible goal, but it's very clearly defined, right? You have a very clear milestone, a very clear goal. You are singularly focused on it. You have a small team. You know, everybody's working around the clock 24/7 and you know, sprinting together. And every day and every hour, you are you're prototyping, right?

• 12:55Speaker 01

  You're learning so you can move incredibly fast. And like every day of every hour, you're making amazing progress and you're learning your things. So that was, you know, that was a total, that was a blast.

• 13:05Guy Raz?

  And every day probably presented a new series of challenges. Do you remember what was one of the hardest challenges that you had to figure out? Like something that just took longer than you thought that you just, it just didn't, it wasn't coming together quickly on working on, on trying to make this happen. Do you remember something you worked on that you just, it was like such a hard problem to solve?

• 13:27Speaker 01

  There's a one, I mean, we had, we had, we had a number. Some were more fundamentally challenging, some were kind of even comical setbacks. Where, you know, you would do a route, I remember one, one of the routes was driving on all of the freeways and crossing all the bridges in the Bay Area. And you know, it's about 100 miles and you go through all of the challenges. And you were, we're attempting this, this drive and the car is doing a good job. You know, it's handling merges and.

• 13:56Guy Raz?

  And you were, you or somebody else was sitting in the driver's, in behind the wheel, just in case.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  That's right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And what might, might made those early days a lot of fun is that you would, if you do everything, right? You would be, you know, putting some hardware in the car. You'd be calibrating the hardware, then you know, the next hour, you're writing some software, you know, whether it's tools or something for the car to actually make decisions. And then, you know, you get in the car and you, you, you give it a try. So anyways, on this route, we are driving along, it's doing a job. We get almost to the very end, right? So at this point, you're, you know, holding your breath, you're, we were waiting. For you know, the last, you know, mile or so of that, you know, 100 mile. And the way that particular run was supposed to finish is that we're coming down the Golden Gate Bridge, into the city.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  And there are a set of toll booths at the, you know, when you go through the bridge.

• 14:48Guy Raz?

  As you, as you go into the city.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 14:50Guy Raz?

  At the end of the Golden Gate Bridge and they're, they're narrow because I use them almost every day.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And, you know, the one that our car wanted to go through was closed at the time. And it's just not something that we ever encountered and we thought about and.

• 15:07Guy Raz?

  Oh, right, because it didn't, it couldn't figure out like the X, the red X or the, the, the green arrow like it didn't, you couldn't recognize what those meant.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  That's right. And there was actually a gate. So, you know, it would stop, but it was like, it would not change lanes and pick a different one. Like, oh, you know, my God, now back to square one.

• 15:23Guy Raz?

  Because probably every, you know, this is impossible to imagine every eventuality. But something's going to come up.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  That's exactly, that's exactly right. And, you know, we would have to deal with, you know, high speed traffic on freeways. You know, we had one route that went and kind of took this windy road from, you know, the Bay Area to Highway one, you know, through the mountains and, you know, we were driving along and then a bicycle fell off the truck in front of us. So, you know, that's not something that that time the car could deal with. We had another route that went through downtown San Francisco and, you know, famous Lombard Street. That's very narrow, very windy and has, you know, some of the most adventurous pedestrians and tourists in the world. So, you know, challenges like that, like, right? So that's what made it so challenging and so interesting that it was the kind of the breadth of the experience.

• 16:15Guy Raz?

  And probably every single ride posed a new series of challenges. Like, I, like, for example, you know, some lanes are shoulder lanes, but then during heavy traffic, they're open for driving. But the lines are painted on them in such a way that it doesn't seem like a lane. Like a human could figure that out, but an autonomous vehicle probably at that time was like, wait, this doesn't make sense. The, the lines. Don't make sense. They don't align. Maybe the car was confused.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. And that would be not the kind of situation or condition that at that time, we would, you know, were able to solve robustly. It was, you know, the goal there was to learn and do, like, we had to do the route once, right? So if you failed at something, you would go, you know, improve the system and you would try it again. So there was, you know, a very well scoped milestone because you, it 100 miles is nothing if you want to build a production system, right? But in those early days, it was long enough that it actually forces you to very deeply think and tackle some of the most fundamental, most important challenges that exist.

• 17:21Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Dmitry Dolgov on how the engineers at Waymo decided to go after the big win and create a fully autonomous vehicle. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 17:39Guy Raz?

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• 19:06Guy Raz?

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• 19:51Guy Raz?

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• 21:13Speaker 04

  Hey Guy Raz and HIBT listeners. My name is Richard Crowdy and my favorite episode as a business professor is the founding of BET because it summarizes business schools perfectly in keeping revenues up and keeping costs down. It also shows that a complex company like a media company can be founded by an individual that bootstraps it with the proper type of innovation. Bob Johnson is also a legend and he's hilarious. I've actually been listening to my top 15 to try to come up with a list for my business students. So, thank you Guy Raz and cheers.

• 21:40Guy Raz?

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• 22:13Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest today is Dmitry Dolgov, the co-CEO of the autonomous vehicle company Waymo. I guess in those early days, the Google strategy was really on creating driver assist technologies, not necessarily fully autonomous cars, but cars that could make it easier for drivers to navigate, basically what you've got in like a Tesla now or some other cars that have driver assist technologies. But I guess around 2013, there was a conscious decision to pivot the focus because most of your testing was done on freeways.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 22:51Guy Raz?

  But what I think you guys and most people involved in the space realize is that to really create complexity, you've got to test these in cities. They've got to navigate city centers and stoplights and left turns and intersections. And so what happened in 2013 to kind of get you guys to focus, to shift your focus on... Building a fully autonomous vehicle instead of just driver assist technology.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Right. I would say there are a number of things. As you mentioned, the first phase was just learning and understanding the complexity of the problem. Then we said, let's try to build the product and that was the driver assist system. You know, we tried that. That was actually reasonably successful. We had ran a pilot where we gave these cars to about 100 Google employees and they could use them to commute and take them around on their daily trips. So that was around 2011, 2012. So then in 2013, we looked at the whole thing and we made this decision to go after full autonomy. So the reasons were several. One was what we learned from people using the driver assist system. They would overtrust it.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  They would put on makeup and text and one guy actually fell asleep. Car handled everything fine, but that does not what we wanted to see. So that was one of the reasons. Another one was that we actually made progress on the core, most difficult aspects of this driving task in on surface streets. So that gave us a bit more optimism of going after like the big prize. And this also, at the same time, the field was moving forward. So if we wanted to really make an impact and make improved transportation globally, I thought, okay, you know, the field, driver assist systems, you know, will develop there.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Other companies will be pushing in that direction, but let's play to our strength, right? And let's go after the uncompromising, big win and big unlock in the space, which is full autonomy and actually building what we now call the Waymo driver that's responsible for the whole task of driving beginning end to end with no human behind the wheel.

• 25:03Guy Raz?

  What do you remember about the conversations and the ambitions? Was it like, hey, you know, let's build the technology for fully autonomous vehicles that we can then maybe one day license? Or was it, no, let's basically become a car company. Let's like make. Fully autonomous technology and purpose-built vehicles and, you know, and eventually sell these to consumers that they can have for themselves. Was it one of either of those ambitions discussed?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I don't think we ever seriously entertained building a car. It just never made sense to me or others to do that. Like, we're not a car company. Building cars is hard. There's many companies that spend 100 years getting very, very good at it. You know, we did in the early days have designed a low-speed vehicle that we called the Firefly because we needed to take that first. That was our zero-to-one moment of full autonomy.

• 26:03Guy Raz?

  It was a prototype. It was like that you showed publicly should display it in 2014. But that wasn't the goal. It wasn't, we're not going to build cars. It was, but we're going to build the technology that can power any car to become autonomous.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And that's, you know, it was the evolution of the thinking and then then then crystallized in the Waymo mission, which is to build the Waymo driver. And then, you know, over time, deploy it in different products and different commercial applications, whether ride-hailing, trucking deliveries, and eventually personally-owned vehicles. And that's the, that's the path that we, you know, set for ourselves and the path that we've been on since that pivot in 2013.

• 26:48Guy Raz?

  Now, in some ways, the real work begins because between 2013 and let's say 2023, right, which we're going to get to because it's incredibly exciting what is going on now in San Francisco and Phoenix and a couple other places. But that 10-year period, it probably, all of a sudden, you're back to kind of startup mode because you've got to get these cars, this technology, to be absolutely foolproof, perfect, but in complex environments like San Francisco, which I think is, next to New York, is one of the most complex driving environments in the United States. Tell me a little bit about the process that then began.

• 27:33Guy Raz?

  Was, is that what happened? Was it a shift to like, okay, let's see what these can do in cities?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. We didn't start with the full complexity of San Francisco in those early days. So we can kind of think of that 10 years as maybe three phases and that correspond to three generations of our technology, three generations of the of our driver. That first one was on that low speed vehicle, the Firefly, and that's what we called the third generation of our driver.

• 28:07Guy Raz?

  And by the way, just to clarify, the Firefly probably was designed to be like a campus type of vehicle, right? Like in a university or an office park, not necessarily in the city.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. I mean, it was a low speed vehicle. It can only move up to 25 miles an hour. So we're thinking maybe large retirement communities or campuses.

• 28:28Guy Raz?

  Like a shuttle that would just, you would get off and on.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And in that first phase, in that third generation of our driver, the goal was to actually build something that can take a fully autonomous trip. And we actually did that in 2015. And we put a friend of our project, his name is Steve Mann, he happens to be blind. And in 2015, he took the first autonomous ride in Austin, Texas.

• 28:55Guy Raz?

  The first person, the first public person that's out of Google.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:00Guy Raz?

  To take a ride. I remember this, this is in, because this is a YouTube video of it. And, and yeah, it was in Austin. And yeah, I mean, that was kind of a big deal.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a huge moment when we were able to do this first ride in 2015. It was a, you know, a big celebration after that.

• 29:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I can imagine. Okay, so at that point, you and your team had built this this third generation version of the Waymo driver that could actually take a fully autonomous trip, which is a big deal. And you were essentially betting that this vehicle would keep passengers safe on a real, on real city streets, right? Like what, what went into the safety design?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. It was also that early phase is what kind of forced us to start thinking about this very fundamental question of what does it mean for a self-driving, fully autonomous vehicle to be ready? I commenced out on this path in 2013. So, okay, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna need a car. It needs to have, you know, a bunch of safety systems. Does that exist? No. Okay. Well, let's design one and work, you know, with partners to manufacture it. So we put a lot of thought and work into making it safe. It had like a foam front. It had a plexiglass window. The sensor pods, you know, were attached with magnets so they, you know, could detach if something were to happen.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  And then we, the sensors at that time, didn't have the level of reliability or capability that we would need, that we would trust, you know, to go to full autonomy. So we built, you know, that generation had our own lidars and, you know, custom sensor suite. And of course, the software that we had to build, like that, none of that existed.

• 30:45Guy Raz?

  So let's, let's talk about the technology for a moment because you mentioned LiDAR and radar and, and some of these things, we know what they are. LiDAR, for example, uses basically light lasers to measure distance. And you've got radar technology, cameras all over, all over the car. Can you just kind of break down how they work? I mean, a lot of people who drive Teslas, for example, I have one, they, if we, if you use the, what Tesla calls full self-driving, which is not really full self-driving, but they rely primarily on cameras. They don't use LiDAR or radar technology. Tesla argues that that is, the other ones are just redundancies that are unnecessary.

• 31:29Guy Raz?

  Tell me how your technology works and, and why you think it's better.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Well, these sensors are, they kind of have fundamentally different and complementary physical properties.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  So cameras give you, you know, the high resolution and, you know, the richness of color.

• 31:51Guy Raz?

  And how many cameras, by the way, on a Waymo vehicle now?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  On the current generation, we have, I think, kind of all of them, including internals, we have 29 cameras.

• 31:59Guy Raz?

  29 cameras. Okay.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  And, you know, but they're passive. And so it's right, you know, somebody else has to bring the light, whether it's your headlights or the sun. Radars and lighters in contrast are active sensors. So they blast their own energy out into the wall and then they get returns. And from that they can make sense of the environment and they use different wavelengths. So they can kind of punch through fog or rain much better than a light or a camera. I think as a human driver, I'm sure you can relate to how difficult they drive. Do to drive at night, right? For example, at night, if you have, you know, somebody, you know, an oncoming car with their headlights on, you know, high beams, it kind of blinds you, right? It's very hard to see.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  It doesn't affect radar or lighter or similarly, you know, driving in, you know, dense rain or fog. So this is why we think kind of using all of the sensors and fusing them in our AI and ML models. So that you can extract the best signal and see the world in the best possible way. Gives us an advantage and you're really, you can build a prototype or you can build a driver assist system, you know, without needing all of that, you know, extra capability, extra redundancy. But if you really want to take the driver out and go for full autonomy, you know, that gives you a boost.

• 33:19Guy Raz?

  All right. So, so just to clarify, like basically you have the first successful ride with a third generation vehicle in 2015. And then in 2016, Waymo actually spins out of Google as an independent company. And then the next year you become the first company to start like regularly operating these AVs in Chandler, Arizona. These are even more advanced than the previous version. What was, was the idea of like, hey, let's get these in really good shape. And then, you know, we'll, we'll turn them into like, like Ubers.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. That, you know, at that point we were pretty clear that that was going to be our first deployment, our first product. And that's actually, that's what we launched in Chandler. You know, that, that's when we created the Waymo one. Product and the Waymo One application. And in 2018 in Chandler, we started offering the service to external riders. And then in 2020 in Chandler, Arizona, we launched the first fully autonomous ride healing service that was open to the public. And just anybody could just download the app and call a car. That was our fourth generation Pacifica minivan. The empty car would go show up and take anywhere. So then we made this decision that it was not the best path forward to kind of incrementally

• 34:41Speaker 01

  grow and scale that system. We made the decision to make a hop to what we call the fifth generation of our driver. That's on the JLR i-Paces, Pacificas and a whole new-

• 34:52Guy Raz?

  This is the Jaguar.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. And we said, hey, let's take a big step. It's going to be a different car. It's going to be a new generation of hardware. It's going to be very different software with big bets on state of the art AI. And okay, let's go after the full complexity of the problem, including the full density of downtown Phoenix and downtown San Francisco. So that's what we were working on in that timeframe to then on that new generation of our Waymo driver to launch the Waymo One service.

• 35:24Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, how Waymo One works today and Dmitri's take on the future of autonomous vehicles. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 36:13Speaker 05

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• 36:46Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Dmitry Dolgov, the co-CEO of the autonomous vehicle company Waymo, which has started to roll out Waymo One, its autonomous ride-hailing service in San Francisco. The city gave you permission to be a ride-hailing service for 24 hours a day. And I've used them probably a dozen times now. They're Jaguar SUVs, all-electric. And they're driving around the city and you just order it like an Uber. You just go out and you go on your app and it comes. And then you unlock the door with your phone and you get in. And you hit start and it goes.

• 37:29Guy Raz?

  And I can't even tell you how many times. The first question I get from people is, aren't you scared? Aren't you terrified when you get in one of these things? And so I have my answer. So what's your answer when people say that to you? Like, this just seems terrifying for a machine to drive you around a city. Like, it seems so scary. Like, it could, you know, he could just go haywire and drive off a bridge or something. What do you say to people when they ask you that?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, at this point, I think I'm much more anxious about human drivers than I am about the Waymo driver. So I have full confidence. But of course, I've been in those cars. Many, many times, hundreds, thousands of times over the years. But what we see with other people, like it's very natural to have that anxiety. It's a very different, very new system and new product. But what we very consistently see, and I guess I would love to hear if that matches your experience. But once people get in the car, you know, after a couple of minutes, they get very comfortable. And they go back to, you know, doing whatever they want to be doing, like, you know, back on their phone.

• 38:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah, exactly. I know. I know. I went, I took my son in it and drove across San Francisco. And yeah, within like 30 seconds or 45 seconds, the first time ever, he's in there. He's like back looking at his phone. And it's true. It's you get in it and then it goes. And it's really cool. You're looking out, looking at the steering wheel turn for the first 45 seconds and then you're done. And then you're just like going back to what you were doing, answering emails or whatever. But it is, it is amazing that, you know, how sort of bizarrely ordinary it feels after, after a couple of seconds.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's great.

• 39:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, that's, that's incredibly exciting. And I think some people kind of draw this parallel that you kind of, your brain switches to passenger mode.

• 39:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  And yeah, you do get all of these benefits of, you know, privacy, whether you want to have a conversation with somebody in the car that you're in the car with, or you want to make a, you know, phone call. And I mean, yeah, that's exactly, you know, why we're, why we're so excited about this product.

• 39:50Guy Raz?

  All right. So Dmitri, in general, right? I'm optimistic when it comes to technology, but I have to also admit that healthy skepticism is important, right? I mean, we've been promised technologies that are going to make our lives better and change the world, only to be, you know, sorely disappointed by them. I think it's really amazing what's, what's happening with autonomous vehicles. But I, I guess I wonder, you know, do you understand some of the cause for concern? Or some of the skepticism around it?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yes, I think it's very natural. That is very new technology. It's very different. So I think if you look back in history, it's very common that when a new thing comes around.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  There is skepticism.

• 40:44Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  There are lots of questions. There is excitement, but there's also a lot of sensitivity.

• 40:51Guy Raz?

  But I wonder, I mean, it's one thing to say, hey, don't worry, this is going to be okay. But how can you guarantee or convince people that the technology couldn't be misused? Couldn't be manipulated in a way that endangers human life?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Well, I guess we should start, I would start with a status quo. Right? We are not okay. Right? If you look at just how many lives are lost to the transportation system that we have today? I'm sure you have heard these numbers before, but well known that in the US alone, more than 40,000 people die every year. I just need to take a step back. This is, it's kind of insane.

• 41:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Right? Imagine if we were to invent cars today or transportation system, like no way we would allow this. Right? And I think we, over time, we just kind of slowly boiled ourselves, society, to accept that. Right? And I think as a first order impact of this technology, we can do better. We can do much better and we are, we're seeing that today. We have driven well north of 5 million fully autonomous miles today. And we've shared some data from the safety impact that our cars have.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  And I think at this point, we have a fairly robust body of evidence that shows that our cars actually have very clear safety benefits where they operate.

• 42:25Guy Raz?

  How do we think about, and there's no easy answer right now because it's both an ethical and a legal question. But how do we think about liability? Right? I mean, if, let's say, I own a car that is fully autonomous with Waymo's technology. Let's say in 10 years from now. And I'm in the back and I'm just doing my work or I'm asleep, you know, which I should rather be doing. I just go to sleep and let it drive me from San Francisco to LA, which would be great, but it gets in an accident of just a very fluke accident. Maybe another car hits it or something. How do we account for liability? I mean, who's responsible? Is the owner of the car? Is Waymo's technology? Like, how is that going to work?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  For the actions of the Waymo driver?

• 43:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  The responsibility lies with Waymo. If it was the fault of another actor, another driver, then you kind of follow the established processes that are well-understood and well-studied by, for example, insurance companies. They have decades of experience of evaluating exactly that question. And this is where that study that Swiss Re has done was very encouraging, that when they looked at almost 4 million miles of our fully autonomous operation,

• 43:52Speaker 01

  they found that massive reduction in, 100% reduction in bodily injury claims and 4X reduction in property damage, right? So that then you can apply, like you can marry the two and you're starting to see the benefits.

• 44:05Guy Raz?

  So if Waymo is, I mean, basically, if in a future scenario, if somebody's in a Waymo car, a Waymo vehicle crashes and it's, there's some kind of fluke and Waymo is responsible, I mean, you guys have to accept that liability. But I guess in order to get to that position, you have to be rock solid confident that that will never happen.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Well, that's what we spend, that's one of the hardest questions that we spend more than a decade working on. We have, we've developed a very robust, multifaceted readiness and safety framework. And actually, that's something we shared publicly. And it's that, what we see in all of those methodologies as we improve and validate our system, that the then of day is what gives us confidence in the performance of the system.

• 44:54Guy Raz?

  How many cars do you have on the streets of San Francisco now?

• 44:57Speaker 01

  We have a fleet in San Francisco of about 250 vehicles. They're not all out at the same time, but it gives you an approximate order of magnitude.

• 45:06Guy Raz?

  And Phoenix?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  About the same, I want to say about a couple hundred cars as well.

• 45:11Guy Raz?

  So here's a question. I mean, is the part of the business model right now for Waymo to become like a ride hailing service? Like, you know, I'm sure, I know you've got a partnership that you announced with Uber, but I mean, is the idea that, you know, in 10 years' time, this is going to be the primary, your primary business or a part of what you do? Give me a sense of, is Waymo going to be a ride hailing service or is it going to be a technology company that licenses its technology to both ride hailing services and automobile manufacturers and others?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Well, we think of ourselves as building a generalizable Waymo driver. And the business model is to deploy it in different product lines, different commercial applications. There's three main ones, ride hailing, that's what we call Waymo One. Then there's trucking and deliveries, moving goods. And then the third one is personally owned vehicles. So that's the long-term vision. We want the driver, there's trillions of miles being traveled, I think almost three trillion in the US alone, much more across the world. So we want to have, you know, a positive impact on some meaningful fraction of all of those miles. So, you know, the first business and the first product is Waymo One and ride hailing.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  But we're exploring different, other different partnerships. Like you just mentioned, that the Uber partnership that we just launched.

• 46:44Guy Raz?

  And that partnership, by the way, is, what is that going to look like? It's going to be the Uber app will also hail Waymo cars?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. You can use the Uber app and get a fully autonomous vehicle.

• 46:58Guy Raz?

  This is not a money-making operation for Waymo right now. I mean, the ride hailing service is still in its infancy, but... You know, there's been billions of dollars invested into Waymo. And I have to imagine ride hailing is not where you're going to make your money. It's going to be from selling this technology. So what, tell me, just from the business perspective, when do you see a path to profitability?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Well, you know, a challenge a little bit that, you know, ride hailing is a massive opportunity.

• 47:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  It is, you know, a very big market today. But, you know, it's growing. There's expectations that it's going to be significantly bigger by, you know, the end of the decade. But if even on top of that, if you factor in, you know, the, you know, the benefits and the, you know, positive economics that fully autonomous vehicles can bring to the table. There's potential for that to, you know, expand quite a bit. So, you know, we were very, you know, laser focused on that as our primary business line. Beyond that, you know, we want to pursue trucking and deliveries and then eventually personally owned vehicles. But right healing, I would not dismiss that at all.

• 48:13Guy Raz?

  So probably unrealistic to say that within 10 years, ordinary people could buy a fully autonomous vehicle for themselves, but probably not unrealistic to say that in 10 years from now, in most major urban centers in the U.S., there will be autonomous taxis available for anybody to use.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  I definitely agree with the latter, and I would not dismiss the former 10 years. This is a reasonably long time and, you know, things can happen nonlinearly.

• 48:41Guy Raz?

  So, final question for you. So, I mean, if the future is autonomous, and I think it is, I think, I really do, I'm convinced. I think anybody who uses one of these taxis will see it. It's, it's so clear, at least to me, you know, you go in it and it, it's a clean car. It's a very good driver. It's a defensive driver, but it's also not overly defensive. So it's not timid. It's like a very good taxi driver, a better. So that I think is, is the future. So, Dmitri, I know that, you know, there are plenty of people who love driving, right? Who love the experience of controlling their car. And those people will continue to want to have that ability, and they will.

• 49:26Guy Raz?

  But in your view, is, are we looking at a future where most people are going to be driven by their cars?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  In the long-term future, I think, yes, I think that that's where we're heading. Maybe taking your car in the future to a racetrack and driving it manually, that's going to be the novel and exciting thing, rather than the mundane, boring task of driving, commuting. And if you imagine a future where a large fraction of your cars in the road are fully autonomous, or at least smart enough, then you can start doing things where you're optimizing more globally. They can coordinate their speed. You can connect them to smarter infrastructure and actually overall increase the throughput of your roads

• 50:20Speaker 01

  and kind of increase the throughput of your transportation system. And farther out in the future, if you look there today, personally owned vehicles can sit around for 90% of their lifetime, right? You take them home or work and then you park it and then nine out of 10 hours is just sitting there. So if that changes, right? If you no longer have to have your car just sitting there for you, it just opens up. There's a lot more space that can be used in cities for other, more interesting things.

• 50:50Guy Raz?

  Dmitry, thank you so much.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  It was a pleasure. Thank you, Guy.

• 50:54Guy Raz?

  That's Dmitry Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with editing by John Isabella and research help from Chris Messina. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neil Rausch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Chris Messina, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Malia Agudelo, Neva Grant, Sam Paulson, and Catherine Seifer. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.