Waymo CEO: Building a self-driving car is like building a rocket-EEWORLD

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Last year was the most important in Waymo's 11 years of developing self-driving cars.

The Google sister company raised $3.2 billion, signed deals with several partners, and launched the world's first true driverless taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona.

Even so, the widespread rollout of fully autonomous vehicles has been slow, staggered and expensive.

“It’s really extraordinary,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in an interview with the Financial Times. “I would say it’s a bigger challenge than launching a rocket and putting it into Earth orbit … because it has to be done safely over and over again.”

In just a few years, any optimism they had was gone.

Waymo confidently predicted in March 2018 that it would produce “up to 20,000” electric Jaguars “within two years and would provide 1 million trips per day for riders in Waymo’s driverless service.”

Two months later, it added that "up to 62,000" Chrysler minivans would join the driverless fleet "beginning in late 2018."

Today, there is little sign that any of those vehicles have been ordered, and Waymo's official fleet size is just 600.

Mr. Krafcik, an auto manufacturing expert who coined the term “lean manufacturing” in the 1980s and rose to become Hyundai’s U.S. chief executive, acknowledged that he and his colleagues relied on their experience in the auto industry to gauge Waymo’s growth rate.

“When we predicted in 2015 that we would have widely available services by 2020, it wasn’t a crazy idea, it was based on facts,” he said. The thinking was: “Well, if we have a prototype, then we can get to mass production in just a few years, right?

“It’s a position that is - I wouldn’t say ignorant - but lacks information and experience ... We’ve become more humble in the last five years.”

Some history

Waymo began as a Google project in 2009 and first publicly demonstrated its driverless technology in 2015, spawning a whole new industry and generating all kinds of hype.

Fearing the collapse of its business model, Uber began spending $20 million a month trying to build its own driverless cars. Its goal is to have 100,000 self-driving cars on the road by 2020.

Its chief product officer warned then-CEO Travis Kalanick in May 2016: “This self-driving war is real for Uber, and we either start a second S-curve or we die.”

But it took Waymo another two years to operate three fully driverless cars simultaneously, and then another year to have 100. After a year of testing, Waymo felt comfortable enough to start carrying some passengers in test cars in Phoenix. Then, three months ago, it opened the network to the public.

slower

Mr. Krafcik said this significantly slower timeline was impossible to overcome. Again using the space analogy, he said it took the Soviet Union and the United States about 10 years to get a rocket into orbit. To get around the moon, it took another decade. “Nobody beat that time,” he said. “It’s just time to do something of this scope and size.”

Aside from Tesla’s continued promises that self-driving technology is just around the corner, the slower timeline has become widely accepted. In 2018, consulting firm Bain said the transition to robot taxis, or “robotaxi,” was “just around the corner,” and predicted that autonomous vehicles would make up 30% of the market by 2030. Now, it expects that figure to be 4% to 9%.

“The reality we’re facing right now is more than just hype,” said Mark Gottfredson, a partner at Bain.

Waymo, with its deep pockets and 2,100 employees, remains in the lead. Meanwhile, Uber abandoned its project last month, effectively handing over its entire self-driving unit to rival Aurora and investing $400 million in exchange for a 26% stake and a board seat.

"Buses, trucks, cars, etc."

But some of Waymo’s competitors are making progress. Zoox and General Motors-backed Cruise have both unveiled specialized vehicles that have no steering wheels or pedals and look more futuristic than the Chrysler Pacificas used by Waymo.

Zoox executives have described its vehicle as the first iPhone, a revolutionary device because its hardware and software are integrated from the ground up.

But Mr. Krafcik noted that Waymo had already tried to build custom vehicles with Firefly, a fully autonomous two-seater designed in 2013 but abandoned it four years later.

The experience taught Waymo that its sole focus should be on Driver, an Android operating system it hopes to run in several different types of vehicles.

“We aspire to have anything that drives on public roads — buses, trucks, cars, whatever,” Mr. Krafcik said. “We don’t want to be tied to a single form factor.”

The partners expect such an approach could generate multiple revenue streams for Waymo, potentially from ride-hailing services, goods deliveries and licensing deals. Last year alone, Waymo struck deals with Volvo for a driverless ride-hailing service, Fiat Chrysler to build delivery vans and Daimler to build articulated trucks.

Some observers see this as a pivot away from robotaxis, which could be expensive to deploy on a large scale, but Mr. Krafcik believes such conclusions are often based on false assumptions. “I keep reading that the hardware associated with the Waymo Driver is $250,000, which is wrong, completely wrong, and not even close.”

Billions of dollars

He refused to consider operating costs and dismissed skepticism about fully self-driving cars, suggesting that anyone with doubts simply look at Waymo's investors, which include venture capital groups Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, institutional investors T. Rowe Price and Fidelity, and automotive groups Magna and AutoNation.

“We don’t talk a lot about the $3.2 billion we raised, but it’s the single largest round of funding ever by a company with a high stakes,” he said. “Obviously, they’re very confident in the economic prospects that Waymo Driver can unlock.”

Mr. Krafcik did not say when or where his ride-sharing service would be launched. Waymo’s conspicuous vehicles can be seen every day in San Francisco, even on Christmas Day, but it will still take years before drivers leave and tourists enter. If so, Mr. Krafcik does not seem perturbed, knowing clearly that in the next few decades it will not matter which precise year marks the turning point.

In the long term, he remains convinced that the technology will undermine personal car ownership, and doesn't hesitate to predict that a child born today will have little reason to learn how to drive.

“[They] absolutely do not need a driver’s license, I can be 100 percent certain of that,” he said. “[They] can use Waymo anywhere [they] can.”

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