The Circuit

Tekedra Mawakana on why safety, not perfection, is the bar

Tekedra Mawakana· Co-CEO of Waymo at Waymo
·~24 min·English·Bloomberg
RoboticsAI SafetyBusiness Strategy
TL;DR

Waymo's co-CEO argues the robotaxi debate is framed wrong: the benchmark is not a flawless machine but the deadly status quo of human driving, and her choices on price, hardware, competition, and jobs all follow from putting safety first.

01The Core Reframe

Society Already Accepts Deaths by Drivers

<strong>The benchmark for a robotaxi is the deadly status quo of human driving, not a flawless machine.</strong>

I think I would rephrase the answer to say society is already accepting a lot of deaths caused by human drivers.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
By refusing the perfection standard, she shifts the burden of proof. The question is no longer prove the car is flawless but prove that today's human-driven status quo, with its routine toll, is acceptable.
02Risk Posture

We Know the Number Won't Be Zero

<strong>Waymo plans for the serious crash it cannot fully prevent, treating it as a matter of when, not if.</strong>

even as we work to eliminate all of these crashes, we know the number won't be zero. And so knowing that means that we also know that there will be an incident, and I think it'll be a really challenging day for us.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
Naming the bad day in advance is itself revealing: by conceding that a serious incident is inevitable, she lowers public expectations ahead of time and frames trust as something earned despite imperfection, not promised in its absence.
03The Technology

Reality Still Outpaces the Simulator

<strong>Every rare real-world event is multiplied into about a thousand simulated variations, yet reality keeps producing combinations no simulation has covered.</strong>

We ingest data about things we've never encountered ever. And then we come up with a thousand scenarios that are adjacent to the thing that we are ingesting, and then things happen that are still a combination of factors that haven't yet been simulated.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
The admission that the tail never fully closes is the same posture as her stance on crashes. It frames autonomy as a process of narrowing the unknown, not a finished product that has solved the road.
04Competitive Strategy

Competing With Any Car That Is Unsafe

<strong>Mawakana names no rival company and instead names a condition, unsafe driving, with ride-hailing only the first business line.</strong>

I think we are competing with any car that is unsafe, and we've started with ride-hailing as our primary focus for this business, but we've always said that we will have other lines of business, including licensing our technology to automotive companies to make it available for sale.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
Defining the competitor as a condition rather than a company quietly expands the market to all driving and makes safety, not price or app loyalty, the thing Waymo competes on. It is the same reframe from section one, applied to strategy.
05Build vs Partner

Strengths on Strengths

<strong>Waymo builds the driver and lets established carmakers build the car, playing each side to its strength.</strong>

We receive the vehicles here in the United States and we have fixed the Waymo driver, the software, the hardware, our full sensor suite in our facility in Phoenix, Arizona.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
Separating the driver from the vehicle lets Waymo stay hardware-agnostic and recast a political attack. The car may be assembled abroad, but the part that drives, she argues, is American intellectual property fitted on US soil.
06The Business Model

Price Is Not the First Priority

<strong>Waymo ranks a consistent experience above a low fare, letting prices rise at peak demand rather than chase the cheapest ride.</strong>

Price is not the first priority. It is important though that we match it with the experience that we're offering.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
In ride-hailing, where competitors race each other to the lowest fare, refusing to lead on price is a bet that trust and consistency are the scarce goods. It only works if the safety claim underneath it holds.
07Labor and Autonomy

Autonomy Isn't a Jobs Mandate

<strong>Mawakana backs the jobs autonomy creates while rejecting any law that forces a human driver into every self-driving car.</strong>

There are a lot of human jobs required in the AV ecosystem, and we should all be championing those, but I don't think that autonomy and manned job legislation go hand in hand.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
The pressure is sharpened by who is applying it: Uber, once the great disruptor of taxi work, now lines up with unions. Mawakana's split lets her claim the pro-jobs ground without conceding that a human must stay behind the wheel.
08The Long Game

1.2 Million Reasons

<strong>The goal is framed as a public-health number: preventing a large share of the 1.2 million road deaths worldwide each year with one driver deployed everywhere.</strong>

The long-term goal is for every vehicle to perform in a superhuman safe manner so that we can eliminate some very large percentage of the 1.2 million road deaths that are happening globally.

— Tekedra Mawakana, The Circuit
Key Insight
Measuring success in deaths prevented rather than cars sold turns a product roadmap into a moral obligation, and justifies the long horizon. The same reframe that opened the interview, human harm as the yardstick, also closes it.