So, we will now begin with our first trans-Atlantic conference call
we’ll hold during this congress.
We will go to Mountain View, California –
in the middle of Silicon Valley.
Of course, we would have wished to greet our next speaker
directly here on stage.
Unfortunately, Covid-19 makes this impossible.
During our first congress planned for April,
he would have come.
But in this situation, it’s just not feasible. We are talking about John Waymo.
John Krafcik CEO of Waymo
Topic: Future of Autonomous Driving
Sorry, I briefly misspoke.
Of course I'm talking about John Krafcik, the CEO of Waymo -
one of the most important driver of autonomous driving.
Ola Källenius already mentioned it this morning
and I’m excited for the talk we recorded prior to the congress.
Welcome John.
It's great to be with you, I'm speaking to you
from Waymo's headquarters,
and we're giving you an opportunity to see inside
our top secret garage where our technicians
and engineers work on the Waymo Driver.
What you're looking at behind me
is the fifth generation Waymo Driver.
It's an all new hardware set to go with our latest
software releases, which we think will be
an even more capable Driver than the fourth generation
Waymo Driver that people now associate with Waymo that's
driving around our
Chrysler Pacifica hybrid vehicles.
We've launched this new driver
I was on my way actually
to the Geneva Auto Show in March when COVID hit
and there we were meant to share with the world
the news of our newest business line Waymo Via
which is meant to move goods from point A to point B,
driven by the Waymo Driver.
We've continued to expand our work on the goods
transportation side and now have really strong
workstreams with Class 8 trucks.
You may have seen some
of our Peterbilt trucks on the road and I think
of interest to many of the folks watching.
We recently signed
an agreement with Daimler trucks
and now have a broad global collaboration
that's starting with their outstanding
Freightliner Cascadia truck, which will be
integrating our fifth generation Waymo Driver
to that wonderful platform to help move goods
around the world from city to city.
We've also got an urban delivery version of Waymo Via
so that we can handle deliveries in cities
and suburban areas, not just highway point-to-point.
We've been so hard at work regarding Waymo One and our
ride hailing progress and it's been challenging,
as you might imagine, because of the pandemic.
Out of an abundance
of caution, we paused our operations
in Phoenix for our riders in March
because we thought that was the best thing to do.
Eventually we brought those operations back up
and I'm really proud to say that
since late September,
where we've brought passengers back into our cars
we've been driving them around in 100%
fully autonomous mode.
So no Waymo employees or
anyone in the driver's seat, the car being completely
controlled by our fully autonomous Waymo Driver.
That's a pretty cool thing.
We've had massive
goodwill and success and lots of great feedback
from those riders who are now able to share
their experiences on social media.
It's been fun for us to see
that because earlier, while we had been giving
those rides, those early riders were
under NDA or non-disclosure agreements.
And now
general members of the public can access
the service and share those experiences
and even share the rides with friends and family.
It's been, it's been wonderful to see
the final thing that we did to sort of punctuate that
was to share with the world our
safety narrative, our safety story.
We wanted to demonstrate
a lot of transparency for the world.
So we went out with two white papers that read very
much like scientific papers, the first one explaining our
framework for safety and how we think about it.
The second one,
sharing performance metrics for our cars and
what we did here, I'm really, really proud of.
It's something completely
different in the fully autonomous space.
You see, usually when companies try
to demonstrate how good their technology is,
they do this by sharing good moments
like a good film, a good demo,
a good recording, some good statistics.
We took the exact opposite approach at Waymo.
We took all of our driving in Phoenix
from January 1st, 2019,
to September 30th of this year, 2020.
Turns out we drove
10 million kilometers
during that year and nine months
and what we decided to do instead of sharing
highlight reel was to share a lowlight reel.
What were all of the issues, every single issue that we had
any time of contact at all.
We shared all of our worst moments
with the idea that if we could share those worst
moments and demonstrate that it really wasn't
that bad, that maybe we could bring
the world along with us to share this
journey with a little bit more confidence
and what we shared about those
10 million kilometers of driving
was that we had a grand total of
47 contacts with other objects in the world.
Many of those
the great majority of those, in fact, 29 were simulated
because a lot of this driving was done with
Waymo-trained drivers in the driver's seat.
And in those cases where the driver maybe had
to take over,
we took that into our computer simulation tool
to understand what would the Waymo Driver have done,
and it's from that vast sharing of data
that we had our own confidence to launch.
And we hope now the world
has the same level of confidence to launch.
It's pretty extraordinary
what we found with that data set.
Waymo has had a big year.
Part of that was announcing the first external fundraise
Can you tell us more about that?
We had always had a plan.
As you know, we're part of Alphabet
and where we're a semi-autonomous unit
within Alphabet, but we've always had this
plan to continue this process toward
potential separation from Alphabet
and one of the first steps
on that path was to take on external investment.
So we began thinking about this last year
and began this fundraising process which completed
in the first half of this year.
We announced back in March
the first two billion dollars or so of funding.
We ended up closing out our
first round with $3.25 billion
of funding from a
a wide swath of wonderful investing partners.
Many of them have become,
in effect, business partners for us.
We get to learn from their
business acumen and other spaces.
Very, very smart financial investors like Silver Lake
and Canada Pension Plan, but also strategic investors.
Folks like AutoNation,
Retail Group here in the US who help us with our
maintenance and fleet operations.
Also, Magna, a tier one supplier who's
helping us assemble the Waymo Driver
in the plant we operate together in Detroit, Michigan.
Yeah, I'd have to say it was a very satisfying
part of 2020,
closing that round as we did.
How has COVID impacted
Waymo's operations over the last several months?
COVID has definitely been a factor for us to deal with.
I mean, it's impacted our operations,
of course, as I mentioned,
we paused our driving in March
in our Waymo One service,
and it also slowed down our ability
to accumulate early test miles
on fifth generation Waymo Driver
that you see over our shoulder.
So there's no question,
it had an impact of at least a couple of months.
But we've done all of those things
all of these precautions
in the interest of ensuring that our riders were safe
and that our employees
and all of our extended team members
were very, very safe, but it definitely had an impact.
It did cause us, though, to to reflect on how we can
do even more work in simulation.
We're well past now,
well over 20 billion kilometers in simulation.
In fact, I think even over 25 billion kilometers
in simulation these days.
And so we're really learning a lot
and advancing the Waymo Driver primarily through
our simulated world.
But we augment that with very,
very necessary road miles, real public road miles.
And no question
the the COVID pandemic has slowed down our ability
to generate this public road miles.
But we're feeling good about our situation right now,
we figured out a way, as most of the world has,
to work through while also
having lots of respect for the virus.
Increasingly we hear some automakers
referring to the vehicle
as self-driving even though they require a human driver.
What's Waymo's perspective on that?
I think in this space,
precision in language is just as important as
precision in engineering, perhaps more so, right?
And from our perspective,
it's actually fairly simple who's driving the car,
who is responsible for driving the car.
If a human driver is responsible for driving
the car and has the legal liability associated with it,
then it's not a self-driving system.
It's not an autonomous system.
It is a driver-assist system.
And that's OK, we need driver-assist systems and
we're very, very happy at Waymo to see
very, very good driver-assist systems
being deployed around the world.
If handled well, they can improve roadway safety,
which is our primary mission.
Our approach at Waymo is completely different
from those trying to
bring driver-assist systems to the world.
Our approach is to bring
a driver to the world, a replacement,
a complete replacement for the human driver.
That is our product.
Our product is not a self-driving car.
Our product is a Driver,
a fully formed, fully autonomous driver
that in time we hope will have the ability to drive
all sorts of cars and trucks
in all sorts of environments around the world.
So really, really important point.
We're a fully autonomous driving solution.
We are not driver-assist technologies.
And I think it's going to be a really good thing
for the world if we all agree
on how to standardize the words that we use
to talk about these technologies.
We don't really feel like we are a competitor in any way
to car companies, rather, where we're building
a different product, we're building a driver,
we're only building a driver.
It's sort of like...
There are lots of analogies that one can think of.
The aerospace industry is is a good one, I think
where there are companies that build
the airframes, the airplanes themselves,
and there are different set of companies that build
the engines, the jet engines
in particular, for those airframe makers,
we should all standardize or specialize
on the things that that we're very, very good at.
And Waymo has built this capability
through our strength and software and new hardware
modalities and sensing modalities like Lidar
and other things that are really,
really well suited to recreate a human driver.
I think that's what we bring
to the world and that's our sole focus to be a driver.
Again, our product is a driver.
Our product isn't a self-driving car
or a self-driving truck.
But we do enjoy partnership
with very many car companies around the world.
And in many cases, they're quite comfortable
with us taking this role as adding the driver
functionality to their cars or to their trucks.
We see that as our place in the mobility ecosystem.
What is the strategy when it comes to OEM partnerships?
I think all OEMs now understand our role
and I think are much more comfortable
with that role that our focus is the driver.
I think if you go back five or six or seven years,
when OEMs were looking at the very embryonic
version of Waymo that existed back then,
One of the very first demonstration projects
for that self-driving car project
was a self-driving car, the little Firefly,
we called it internally, which many people have come
to associate with the Google self-driving car project.
That was really just sort of like a pilot.
It was like an avatar
for the space showing what could be.
But I think automakers,
and I was at an automaker at the time,
looked at that and said,
"what the heck, Google wants to be a car company?
This doesn't make sense."
Since that time,
we've made it very clear to the world,
or at least we've tried to do so,
that our product, again, isn't self-driving car,
but rather is very specifically
the hardware and software that is the driver
that replaces the human driver in the same sorts
of cars and trucks
that are driven on roads today.
Car manufacturers are just realizing
that the development of highly automated cars is
more complicated than they thought.
Do we share this impression?
I think because we've been
in this space now going on 12 years, we have a great
insight into the challenge of doing this.
And...
we were talking about driver-assist
and how I think it's very important to separate
the requirements and the capabilities
of a driver-assist system from a fully autonomous
driver solution, which is Waymo's approach
we believe strongly at Waymo that there's
a massive discontinuity between driver-assist
and a full human driver replacement.
It's not a linear progression in technology.
It's not like you get better at a driver-assist system
and then suddenly
you've got a fully autonomous driver.
Our own experience,
because we try to do it that way,
was that it doesn't work,
that this is just a fundamentally different
approach and a fundamentally
different solution set that's required
to bring a replacement for a human driver
into a car or a truck and have that entity safely
move that vehicle platform from point A to point B.
John, do you actually like to drive yourself?
And if so, what kind of car?
I have a soft spot
in my heart for German engineering.
And yeah.
So I've got I've got three
Porsche 911s, which I know sounds very, very silly.
They are a wide range of this wonderful model.
I love it so much.
I've got a 1993
Porsche 911 Targa.
I've got a 2006 911 C2S,
that's the 997 generation,
and we also got a 2018 911 GT3
with the touring package.
It's a beautiful car, my favorite car.
I will probably hold
on to these things forever for the rest of my life.
I cherish them so much.
It's just one of the reasons
I'm grateful for the prowess of German engineering.
I see it and feel it every day
I drive those cars,
and I hope that brings a sense of...
I don't know, safety and comfort
for industry in general.
I think the personally owned
car will continue forever more.
And really what we're doing
with the Waymo Driver, if you think about it
from a really big picture standpoint,
is creating a replacement for those times when we
humans don't really want to drive ourselves
from point A to point B.
We're going to have this new
fully autonomous driver that can take care of those
times, like, for example, our morning and evening
commutes when we're all back at work.
And I think that's going
to unlock a lot of productivity,
a lot of efficiency and allow us, who knows,
to have even more fun, personally owned cars
in our garages and driveways in the future.
OK, if all your Porches in your garage
are the future of the mobility,
we all might have a lot of fun.
Thank you so much, John. Bye bye.