Waymo robotaxis are so safe that, according to the company’s data, its driverless vehicles are involved in 91 percent fewer crashes compared to human-operated vehicles.
And yet the the company is bracing for the first time when a Waymo does kill somebody — a moment its CEO says society will accept, in exchange for access to its relatively safer driverless cars.
“We really worry as a company about those days,” said Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana on Monday during TechCrunch‘s Disrupt summit, as reported by SFGate. “You know, we don’t say ‘whether.’ We say ‘when.’ And we plan for them.”
“I think that society will,” she said in answer to a question on whether the public is prepared for a Waymo to cause a death. “I think the challenge for us is making sure that society has a high enough bar on safety that companies are held to.”
It’s strikingly mask-off utilitarian discourse from a tech CEO, but on those terms it’s also hard to argue with the logic: if Waymo’s cars are really safer than the average human driver, their widespread use would be a net good for traffic safety even if they still cause a trickle of accidents.
Driverless vehicles such as Waymo, started in 2009, are relatively new entrants to our roadways; lawmakers and companies are still rewriting the rules of the road when it comes to autonomous cars — so consider the society question unsettled, especially since the industry’s overall record is quite spotty.
For example, Waymo’s rival Tesla has notched at least three crashes involving its robotaxi service, not to mention lawsuits the company had to settle this year after Tesla’s Autopilot was accused of being at fault in two fatal incidents.
General Motors’ robotaxi competitor Cruise recently restarted operations after a pause following a 2023 incident when a Cruise robotaxi dragged a woman down a San Francisco street for 20 feet; that woman settled for millions after she sued the company.
But if anybody can handle any safety issues, Waymo seems heads and tails above its competition because its rollout into city streets has been extremely slow and deliberate; Mawakana said at the TechCrunch summit that the company continually retests its vehicles in order to address challenges that pop-up such as Waymos accidentally blocking emergency vehicles.
“We need to make sure that the performance is backing what we’re saying we’re doing,” she said.
(Complicating matters: self-driving car companies including Waymo still employ “remote operators” who can control a car in trouble from afar if it runs into trouble; it’s unclear how often these unseen employees need to step in, and whether reducing their role as robotaxis go mainstream would affect safety statistics.)
And even with its above-average safety record, Waymos have been known to behave in inexplicable ways, such as when one passed a stopped school bus that was unloading kids in Atlanta. That’s a violation that normally garners $1,000 fine and a court hearing, but nothing was issued to the company.
“These cars don’t have a driver, so we’re really going to have to rethink who’s responsible,” said Georgia state Representative Clint Crowe to Atlanta news station, KGW8.
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