(upbeat music)
- Hello, from San Francisco.
This is Patrick McGee from the Financial Times
and I'm quite excited about this upcoming interview.
We've got 30 minutes with John Krafcik.
He is charismatic, he is energetic,
and he is the CEO of Waymo,
formerly known as the Google self-driving project,
which goes back to 2009.
They are really in, I mean, I think
pretty basically you could say
they're the leading self-driving / driverless
/ autonomous robot taxi service operating.
They operate the only real driverless service
in Phoenix right now.
They, I believe test in 25 cities, including on my streets
it's even possible that I'll flip the camera at some stage
if a Waymo goes by.
They've done more miles autonomously
than any other driverless company.
And if we really want to get a sense of
when this technology might change our lives,
I think it was nobody better to speak with
than John Krafcik CEO of Waymo.
Who is joining me here.
So hello, John.
- Hey Patrick, it's great to be here.
Thanks so much for having us.
- You got the Waymo mug very nicely placed just over your-
- Yeah, Waymo mug is strategically placed
and over my other shoulder,
there's the little Firefly prototype.
- Oh, wait, I can't see it.
I feel like I see a globe.
Oh, I see just above that, yes.
All right, we'll get to the Firefly in a second
'cause that's really interesting.
Yeah, this is your no pedals, no steering wheel vehicle
but you've moved beyond that.
And actually that's something that I wanna get to
in a little bit.
I'm hoping you can begin
with what I consider to be a pivotal story for Waymo.
Which is you developed your first driverless car
in I think late 2009, 2010.
And by 2012 you were doing these pilot projects,
allowing Google employees,
So people that had nothing to do
with the self-driving project,
you're allowing them to commute with their vehicles.
Sorry, with your vehicles.
Telling them, you know under no circumstances,
should you not be overseeing the vehicle.
You need to be doing that, but look how cool this is.
You know, let's do some tests and you filmed them.
And I think the film, when the footage came back to you,
it shocked you and it really
put Waymo on a different trajectory.
So do you wanna tell us that story?
- Yeah, yeah and maybe just the tiniest bit of context too.
So you're right, Patrick.
The project started in 2009 and by 2010,
this scrappy little team of 20 to 30 folks
had done some pretty extraordinary demonstrations
of fully autonomous driving.
Famously there were 10, 100-mile challenges
that the team was able to compete
in the first year and a half or two years.
One of them included driving all around your neighborhood
in San Francisco and then over to Lombard Street.
There was another challenge.
They went from Mountain View up El Camino, all the way
222 stoplights or whatever it was to San Francisco.
The team drove around Tahoe, the team drive to Santa Cruz.
So they made a lot of progress
in demonstrating the promise of the technology, right?
And so at the time Google's thought was,
well, what's the first viable at scale commercial product?
The initial hypothesis was ironically
something called autopilot, team called it autopilot.
And it was meant to command the car very safely
to drive the car very safely
from entry point to a highway or freeway to exit point.
And so in Google fashion at the time,
the company asked for volunteers within Google,
we call this internally in the Google world, dogfooding.
And lots of people were interested in this possibility.
You'd get a free car at the time, the team was putting
the driving mechanisms and the sensors
and the compute onto Lexus RX SUVs.
And there was a great demand for folks
to actually give this a try.
So the bar was set quite high.
You had to agree to certain stipulations
including an indication that you understood
this was beta technology and it might not be perfect.
So you needed to stay at vigilant.
You could take your hands off the wheel
but you had to keep your eyes on the road.
You had to stay alert
and we'd have cameras in the car to monitor you.
And if we saw you misbehaving,
we would take away this great privilege, right?
So we started the project sometime in February,
I think it was 2013.
And within a month we shut the project down
because we saw so many examples of humans misbehaving.
And it's this fundamental conundrum that we face
whenever humans are forced to supervise technology, right?
It's really hard
and as the technology gets better and better
and by the way this technology
that we had at that time was amazing.
Humans tend to check out and just assume that
the technology is going to be perfect.
So in our videos, which you can find in,
Patrick, if you haven't seen them we can send them to you.
I think they're somewhere on our website at waymo.com.
We saw some first indications of concern with
the folks in the driver's seat turning around
to fuss with things in the backseat.
We saw one woman putting on makeup, using an eyelash curler.
And the scariest thing we saw was a Googler
who was driving to work early in the morning, predawn,
driving down highway 280 at about 62 miles an hour
who fell asleep because they had so much confidence
in this technology that had been working for them so well
over the course of a week or so, right?
They had already checked out.
So we shut that effort down and it sort of inspired us
to move in a different direction to solve for full autonomy,
fully autonomous driving.
- Okay, so let me pause you there.
The reason I'm bringing up this seven-year-old story
is I feel like it has added urgency now
because Tesla, which I guess to some extent is a rival,
has its own technology also called Autopilot.
But the latest iteration is called full self-driving.
And I feel like it's pretty clear they've come to the same,
you know, fork in the road.
They've seen the same problems with automation, complacency.
And yet they've basically said, you know,
"We're not taking liability, the driver is."
They have some prompts that they agree to
and we're gonna allow the system to run.
And they want to expand it, you know eventually to
potentially hundreds of thousands of vehicles.
So based on Waymo's decision,
I wanna know to what extent you think that's reckless.
Because I don't know that regulators and consumers
really make distinctions between
different self-driving systems.
And what worries me is that
if mistakes get made on Tesla's part
and you know, these are cars traveling 60 miles an hour
so clearly fatalities could be involved.
Does that not pose a risk that you cast upon
on the entire self-driving industry?
- Yeah, maybe a couple points to make there, Patrick.
It is important that we talk about these things.
The first is Waymo's mission in the world,
isn't to be a car company.
Our product is a driver.
That's our sole focus.
And if you look at the business lines
that we are just now starting,
for example the ride sharing service that is fully open.
Unlimited availability to anyone who's in Southeast Phoenix,
you can hail a Waymo.
Just download the app and a fully self-driving Waymo
will come in and take you from wherever you wanna go,
from wherever you are to wherever you wanna go.
So the technology is here right now.
Our key technology is the driver.
That's the most important point.
That's what we're here for.
We're not a car company, therefore,
so we really don't see Tesla as a competitor.
Rather we see Tesla and other car companies
working primarily in the driver assist area,
which is important and good.
And good driver assist technology can save lives.
There's no question about it.
The challenge, I think for the auto industry,
the traditional auto industry, is to ensure that
consumers understand the limitations, right?
And the conundrum that we saw at Google back in 2013 is,
as the driver assist systems get better and better
and better, humans will tend to have more propensity
to check out and not do as good a job as
supervising that technology.
It's a challenging conundrum.
So the good news right now is that the driver assist systems
do need human attention and they require
constant surveillance and humans are able to stay
sufficiently busy for the most part,
monitoring those things.
As they continue to get better, though that's the challenge.
You would think that there would be increased safety
but there's also increased risk at the same time
that the human licensed driver in the driver's seat
might check out at just the wrong moment
when the car needs some help.
- But do you worry about Tesla being reckless
and posing risks that might come back to haunt
the likes of Waymo?
- I think, you know, it's nothing that we can really control
at the Waymo side.
We're gonna do our best to speak about our technology
and deploy it safely and responsibly.
You know, I do think it's important
for all the participants, both on the driver assist side
and the fully autonomous side
to be as precise as possible with language, right?
And if a licensed driver is required,
it should be referred to as a driver assist system.
If a licensed driver in the car isn't required,
which is the only technology that Waymo is working on,
then I think then you should call that
a fully autonomous solution.
- Right.
Okay, so given that you went over some of the early facts
of having a autonomous driver system
that could navigate Lombard street,
you know, famous tourist, windy hairpin turn street
in San Francisco 10 years ago.
What in a sense is taking so long
for this to sort of conquer cities the way that Uber did?
I think a hundred cities within four years.
And I guess what I look back to with Waymo is
in 2018 you ordered 60,000
or up to 60,000 Chrysler Pacificas
and up to 20,000 Jaguar, I‑PACEs.
But if I look for the latest statistics,
the latest I've heard is still around 600 vehicles.
I think you probably just haven't updated it
and it's more than that,
but correct me if I'm wrong, it's not in the thousands.
It's not in the tens of thousands.
So why the postponement in delaying a driverless solution?
- Look, I think the technical challenge
that we're talking about is probably the most complex thing
that a group of humans have ever tried to do.
Moving a large physical mass from any point A to any point B
on the ground with all of the chaos and entropy
that's associated with traffic
is an extraordinary task, right?
There's no question.
And if you look at our timeline, yeah,
it has taken some time.
We demonstrated the first fully autonomous ride
on public roads back in 2015.
In October 2015 in Austin, Texas.
We're just past the five-year mark now.
And if you look at the chunks of time since then, Patrick,
so that was 2015, it took us another couple of years
to upgrade that technology to our fourth generation.
That Firefly car was our third generation technology.
The Pacificas that you see driving around now
in San Francisco, they are the backbone
of our service in Phoenix,
that's our fourth generation technology.
It took us a couple of years
to have fully driverless capability,
fully autonomous capability in Phoenix
with the Pacificas and our fourth-generation technology.
That jump was important though
because we went from low speed driving
which was sort of the ODD, the operating design domain
for the Firefly was below 25 miles per hour.
It turns out that's the only way you can
put a car without a steering wheel on the road right now
with the federal motor vehicle safety requirements
that are out there.
We use the neighborhood electric vehicle
classification called FMVSS 500.
I know I'm getting pretty geeky right now but
that's why the Firefly really wouldn't work at scale.
Because it was sort of limited to a 25 mile per hour speed.
Which makes it pretty undesirable
for most city driving and suburban driving.
- I actually didn't know that, I wanted to ask.
I spoke to Aisha Evans from Xerox yesterday
and they've gone in the direction of,
you know, moving from Toyota's
you know, ordinary Toyotas does they'd outfited.
And they're introducing, you know, in a few weeks
their fully driverless solution that doesn't have
you know, steering wheels or a pedal.
Waymo has already done that
and then actually moved beyond that back to retrofitting
Pacificas and I‑PACEs.
So is that the answer that regulatory reasons
demands that there is a steering wheel?
- Well, right now there's no path right now
other than a potential exemption path
to have a full speed vehicle,
a vehicle that can go over 25 miles per hour,
without a steering wheel or brake pedal.
So it is one of the reasons we chose to move
from a dedicated format
but really not the primary one, Patrick.
Like if you think about the analogy of a human driver,
a really good human driver
with a commercial driver's license can drive
a class A truck, they can drive a motorcycle,
they can drive a car, they can drive a bus.
That's the analogy that you should think of
when you think about the Waymo driver, right?
We aspire to drive anything that moves on public roads.
Buses, trucks, cars, whatever.
And we don't wanna be tied to a single form factor.
We're designing this driver so that it can drive
just about anything without too much incremental effort.
Truly the hardest thing that we're doing,
the thing that is 99.9% of the problem
is the development of the driver.
Do you know the old adage about teaching a monkey
to recite Shakespeare from a pedestal?
There are two tasks involved.
One is getting the monkey to jump up on the pedestal.
The other is getting the monkey to recite Shakespeare.
If you're tackling a big problem, like autonomous driving
you have to decide what is your focus going to be?
Is your focus going to be getting that monkey trained
to jump on top of the pedestal?
Or is it just start with the tougher thing first?
And our approach at Waymo has always been
the hard thing is replicating the extraordinary capability
of the human driver.
That's the super hard thing.
So that has been our focus.
There are lots of wonderful car companies in the world
who are happy to partner with us
and they're able to provide us those skills that we need
and the opportunity to integrate our Waymo driver
with a multitude of vehicle types.
- And so where are we at late 2020?
I know that you're a real car guy.
In fact, I probably should have said at the introduction.
I mean, you were formerly the CEO of Hyundai America.
I believe you spent almost 15 years at Ford.
Been doing this since the early eighties.
And you must be a good driver.
I think you own a Porsche 911.
How does the Waymo compete
with your own driving capabilities?
- (laughs) So the Waymo driver is for sure
the world's most experienced driver.
You know we've driven over 20 million miles,
but more importantly we driven
billions of miles in simulation.
That's the primary way that we're refining
in improving the capability of the driver.
You know, it's an extraordinary thing.
Whether or not I'm a better driver than the Waymo driver,
I think I would put my bets on Waymo.
And the reason for that is...
(indistinct chatter)
But the thing about human drivers, right?
Like we can be great drivers when we're focused.
The problem is human drivers are human
and we lose our focus.
And our driving ability is often
tied to things like distractions or lack of sleep
or having had a glass of wine, or you know
looking at your phone and responding to a text.
These are the failure modes of humans
which the Waymo driver is immune to.
- Is it so that you're testing currently in 25 cities?
- Right now I think we're in something like five or six.
We had been across 25 different cities in our history.
Right now we're driving, we have the service up and running
the Waymo One service up and running in Phoenix.
We're doing a lot of driving in San Francisco.
We spent a bit of time in Los Angeles this year,
in the Seattle area in Kirkland.
We drive a lot in Detroit and Ann Arbor.
We've also been in Miami this year
and the Upper Peninsula in Michigan,
where we did some winter testing.
So we've been all over the place.
- Out of curiosity then, if I take these five or six regions
and just say, what if Waymo One
just launched in all of those cities tomorrow?
You know, for some reason you were just mandated to do it.
The car sounds like it's capable to handle the challenge
but you're not doing that.
So, I mean, what would happen in that hypothetical scenario?
- Oh, I think in that hypothetical scenario, you know,
we would, well, first of all,
let me I guess maybe challenge the context of the question.
We do very well, where we have spent time
learning how to drive and mastering that environment.
There are different challenges in different locations
that take time for us to assure that
we've got confidence to drive well in all those locations.
So I wanna go back to what we did in Phoenix
which is sort of flipping the conventional model,
you know around.
What we decided to do in Phoenix to demonstrate
that we were capable,
was to share with a couple of white papers
that we released at the end of October, Patrick.
First our methodology for safe driving,
but then the results of all of our driving in Phoenix
from January, 2019 to September 30th, 2020.
We drove 10 million kilometers
in Phoenix during that period.
And we shared all of the contact points
that we had with the world.
There was something like 47 of them in total.
In each of those 47 cases, there was a human agent
who had some level of fault and in most cases
almost all of the fault.
But in all of those cases, the incidents were low speed
and relatively low damage.
And the idea was as opposed to sending out
a shiny demo video trying to demonstrate
that the Waymo driver is capable,
we took the exact opposite approach.
This is all of our driving.
These were all of the things that happened
that weren't ideal.
And you know what?
It turns out that they're not so bad.
So we had that level of confidence in Phoenix
to make the service fully available
to anyone who wants to use it as it is right now,
based on that experience.
And now as we move to other ODDs, other cities,
we wanna have that same level of comfort
and experience as well.
So we would do that before we just said,
okay, let's drive everywhere.
- And so if the tech challenge is largely solvable, you know
like that sounds like it's in sight
and you've done it for one city and presumably
it's just a matter of time before you do it in others.
At what stage does profitability come into play?
'Cause these vehicles are pretty expensive.
A lot of research has gone into this.
You know, do you have a sense of what costs per mile
is it to operate these vehicles?
And are you gonna undercut the likes of Uber, Lyft
and taxi services on price?
And if so, you know, how does that
vary your profitability goals?
I mean, there's profitability at all on the horizon
for the next decade, or is that something to think about?
- Absolutely, the unit cost economics
of fully autonomous driving are really attractive.
I think it's one of the reasons why, you know
so many investors are interested in this space.
Ride hailing miles right now
have a top line revenue per mile of about $2,
$2 plus per mile, depending on the city.
And it's very easy to imagine a pathway
to really strong margins for businesses like Waymo's,
with Waymo One.
The technology costs was something of course that
we keep tight within within Waymo for competitive reasons.
But the cost of the Waymo driver is significantly lower
than I think the expectation is.
Just to give you a general sense, it's in the range
of the cost of the cars that we're driving.
So it's not an extraordinarily expensive piece of technology
when integrated with an electric vehicle,
which is our priority right now to have 100% complete.
- One thing I wonder about is, I mean,
did you envision a time and maybe just, you know,
as little as five years, where in a particular city,
you are competing with multiple
driverless Uber type services?
And if that's the case, is there not a risk of that?
There's sort of a race to the bottom?
In terms of prices, is there not a risk
that the self-driving software that's costs, you know,
billions of dollars to develop that it becomes
commodified to some degree
and that you have to differentiate on something else,
maybe that's comfort or timing?
- I think if developing self-driving fully autonomous
technology is one of the more challenging things
humans have ever tried to do.
I think the second most challenging thing might be
trying to understand where competitors in this space are
and where their capabilities really are.
It's fairly inscrutable, Patrick.
It's hard to understand.
So I really don't feel equipped to opine
on what anyone else in this space, where they might be
or how well they might be doing.
There's really no way to define it
without more transparency from everyone in the space
and understanding what their true capabilities are.
I have to say though that just based on our experience,
we know the challenge and one of the things we've learned,
we've learned to become very humble
over these last five years
because we understand what we might've thought in 2015,
we became so much smarter by 2017 when we got
three fully driverless cars up and running at the same time.
It took us another year in 2018
to get a hundred fully driverless
Pacificas up and running at the same time.
And it took us another year to have the confidence to
routinely put citizens of Southeast Phoenix into our cars.
And it took us another year, right?
To feel that confidence to leave it open to everyone.
So it's a long road, it's an extraordinary grind.
It's extremely expensive to do it well.
You need a massive compute power.
You need a huge team of really talented
software engineers to deliver this.
I'm proud to say Waymo's got an absolutely amazing team.
There are now 2100 Waymonites working to bring vision
of fully autonomous driving to the world.
And I'm quite confident we've got the most capable team
in the world to make this thing happen.
- Who's your biggest competitor?
- What's that?
- Who would you call your biggest competitor?
- As I said, it's impossible to define that.
I really don't have a good understanding.
I'm not sure anyway.
- Have you planned in an Argo AI and a Zoox 'cause I mean,
to what extent do the executives allow each other
to try out their vehicles or is that just journalists?
- Let's see.
I don't think I've been invited yet into any of those cars
but at this point I'd like to extend an invitation
to anyone who wants to drive in a Waymo.
Just come down to Southeast Phoenix
and you could give it a try
- Yeah, well I guess that no special permission needed.
Okay, like several questions come in
and there's some overlap in the questions.
So let me just try to sort of give you three at once.
Obviously a lot of them are forward looking.
One question is just how you're gonna
commercialize your products.
A few people, want to note on licensing the technology
to OEM so I guess offer their own services
that would use the Waymo technology
but presumably not be called Waymo One.
And someone wants to know, are you working on, you know,
what might be called Firefly 2.0.
So are you gonna return to developing
your own vehicle at some stage?
And another question, actually, you know what?
The second is a little bit different
so I'll let you answer those two first.
- Okay, so we've got two primary business lines at Waymo.
Waymo One moves people in things from point A to point B
that's up and running.
Waymo Via moves goods.
And we have two different vehicle types.
We're using the Pacificas right now
with companies like UPS and AutoNation also in Phoenix.
And then we have our class 8 projects
and our wonderful new partner Daimler trucks.
You know them through the Freightliner brand in the US.
We're applying that Waymo driver to class 8
over the road trucking that we'll be starting
on interstate 10 and roads like that in the Southwest US.
So those are the two primary go to market modes.
Folks who are always interested
in the personal car ownership model.
And we're working on that with our OEM partners right now.
It's not priority one for us because of the social benefit
takes a little bit more time, right?
But the downside of personally owned cars is
they're only in use for about 5% of their time, right?
And so we can't really get as much social benefit
from the technology as we can in a ride sharing model
or in the Waymo Via goods movement model.
But we'll have that.
I think it will be likely a subscription model though
where you can subscribe to this car
for six months or a year.
And then after that period, that car will move
into a Waymo One like service, where the rest of the mileage
in lifetime of the car can be consumed very efficiently.
We imagine getting 300,00 500,000,
maybe up to a million miles in total from these cars,
which is gonna help drive down those unit costs
that we talked about earlier, Patrick.
It's gonna be a relatively trivial aspect
of the total cost stack.
The cost of the car, then the cost of the driver
when you look at it over a very high number of miles.
- This other audience question was,
if you were restarting now what would you do differently?
- Restarting going all the way back to the Chauffeur stage.
You know I think our journey was a fairly efficient journey
although it doesn't seem like it.
I definitely would imagine thinking more deeply
about the Firefly or not.
In the end I think it served a really good purpose.
It became an avatar for the space
and an emblem that everyone could look at
and provided some awareness to the work
that we were doing at that time,
even as a very small entity.
So I don't know, no, maybe no,
no significant changes to the approach we've been taking.
We've always had the motivation to move people and goods.
That's always been part of our mission.
And we really haven't changed that
even in the midst of COVID.
I think it reinforced the need
to deploy the Waymo driver flexibly
so that it could move both people and goods
from the very start.
And I think the vision that we've had of
flexibly applying the Waymo driver to a lot of
different vehicle form factors is a really robust approach.
I think it makes sense.
- We somehow are already down to just two minutes left.
I feel like we've just started.
- How can that be?
- One thing I wanna know,
I mean, obviously the biggest congratulations ever
for being sort of first to launch a true service,
you know driverless for ordinary passengers in Phoenix.
But I would not be sure if people in Arizona
that can use this service would consider it
you know, sort of transformational to their lives.
I mean, I could be wrong there, but like, you know,
when we think of a self-driving future,
you know, we're often thinking about like
entire cities could be reshaped, right?
We wouldn't need so many parking spaces
and things like that.
So I'm just curious as to whether
there's a disconnect there between, you know,
being able to launch the service in many cities
and when we get this sort of revolutionary impact.
I mean, is that decades into the future?
How do you have to think about that?
- It's definitely not decades.
One of the cooler things about the launch in Phoenix is,
we've got well over a thousand riders
they've taken tens of thousands of rides.
And for them it does feel just normal.
Like it's pretty extraordinary.
We didn't focus our launch on tech enthusiasts.
We focused our launch on the general population of folks
who might need to move from point A to point B
and for whatever reason didn't want to drive themselves.
So to me, it's sort of cool that it's just become
this thing that's part of their daily lives now.
I do think the revolutionary aspects
that you're talking about, we'll see more frequently
as we begin to scale in cities like San Francisco, Patrick,
you'll feel that more.
I see the time ticking down as well.
Patrick, I hope this is okay.
But I got to see in the pre-show that you have
a new addition to your family
and we talked a little bit about, yeah.
A little wildcard.
(indistinct chatter)
Yeah, we wanted to give you this.
This is a Waymo onesie.
We give this to all of the Waymanites
who are making new humans.
And what's cool about this set is there's newborn size.
This is the six months size.
Now you get a sense for, you know,
the size that your new child is gonna have.
That's the 18 months and beyond size.
So we aim to keep your sweet little child in Waymo wear
for at least the first couple of years of life,
I hope that's okay.
- Look, I know we're a minute over,
but I feel like people are willing to listen
to John Krafcik so maybe that's okay.
I just wanna throw in a last question,
which was that, you know,
I don't know to what extent Chris Urmson
was your predecessor or something along those lines.
He is the Google self-driving project,
but he had said I think in 2016
that he had a 13 year old and his goal was that his son
would never get his driver's license.
You know, it was a Ted Talk,
I think he was partly making a joke.
But it also speaks to me of where
how quickly we thought this was happening.
So let me just give you far more latitude.
This three week old I have,
is she ever going to need a driver's license?
You know, how much is really going to change
in the next 15 and a half,
well, I guess it really is 16 years?
- She absolutely will not need a driver's license.
I can say that with a hundred percent confidence.
They're gonna be so many different modes
of transportation available.
I mean, if she wants to, she can get one.
And Patrick, I'm glad you mentioned that
I do love cars and I love driving cars still.
We're always gonna have personally owned cars.
There's no concern about that.
And by the time she's driver license age appropriate,
she'll be able to use Waymo's
in just about any place that she might be.
There may be other companies as well
that provide that service, but you'll also have access
to cars that have the ability to convert I think,
into a true L4 experience.
I think we'll have cars like that,
the subscription model that I mentioned earlier.
So, yeah, that's one less thing for you to worry about
and as a parent who got through two kids
through the driver's license age,
I can tell you that it's nice
that you won't have to deal with that burden for sure.
- Okay, I promise this is the last question.
But I would actually question what you just said
which is the idea that we'll always be able to drive.
I mean, sure, if we're talking race circuits and so forth
I think that'll always be a possibility.
But I suspect that if it's 40, 50, 60 years in the future,
time when I hope we're both still alive,
that once you've determined on a city by city basis
that robotic vehicles are truly saving lives
and that they're available at scale
and that everybody could take them,
surely it becomes a logical thing
that driving becomes banned.
I mean, in the same way that, well, I guess,
I was gonna go on the horse analogy we won't go for that.
There's no horses on the highway.
The last panel I had was already about a dedicated corridor
in Michigan that I'm sure you're familiar with
that will be sort of exclusive
to connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles.
And one assumes that that one lane eventually becomes two
eventually becomes three,
eventually becomes a whole four lane highway.
That actually strikes me as sort of obvious
granted decades into the future.
But you seem to question that.
- Yeah, well, I guess I agree with the point that
there will be some roads or some parts of cities more likely
that exclude certain sorts of transportation
perhaps personally owned transportation.
We're seeing that in some city centers already, right?
The exclusion of cars, which would also, I believe,
tend to exclude fully autonomous cars as well.
Yeah, I think there will be cases and situations
in some areas where perhaps there will be something
that says you can't drive a car here,
if you want to humanly drive a car.
But I think those will be the exception more than the rule,
but we'll see, we'll see.
- Okay, yeah, no, I mean,
we're talking decades in the future.
Okay, well, thank you so much, John Krafcik.
You know I believe this is the final, you know,
this is the wrap up interview for the entire event.
All that stuff is what we're all looking forward to
which is the audience can ask me, Peter Campbell
and Joe Miller, the three journalists running this event
any question they want.
So I encourage everyone to stay tuned and watch that.
And thanks so much again to John
and look out for a Waymo in a city near you.