How Waymo Made Self-Driving Cars a Reality | Dmitri Dolgov, Co-CEO

Dmitri Dolgov (0:00)

When we started in 2009, it was not about building a product. The question at that time was like, should we even try? Is the time appropriate, or should we just go back and come back in a decade or so? What does it mean for autonomous vehicles to be ready? What's good enough? And what if the brakes fail? What if the steering fails? What if you lose power?

SPEAKER_2 (0:16)

Which nine was the hardest?

Dmitri Dolgov (0:17)

The one you're working on right now is always the hardest, but also the most interesting, the most exciting one. I can give you the model that we have right now. I don't think you would know what to do with it. It's been 17 years to get to where we are today.

SPEAKER_3 (0:32)

I still vividly remember my own first Waymo ride. We had just finished the SPC holiday party. It was just like 10 of us, our team members, and one of our team members said that they just got early access. So why don't we take a Waymo to our next spot? I remember getting in, I was sitting in the front seat, and I'm sure you get this, it felt like a religious experience.

There's no one driving the car, it all worked. I was equal parts fascinated, scared a little bit, amazed, you hear that often, that it's kind of feeling like a quasi-religious experience when people have this for the first time.

Dmitri Dolgov (1:10)

The word magic does come up, some people are excited and very comfortable even before they get in, some are more nervous, some need somebody to actually handhold them.

SPEAKER_3 (1:22)

Get them to be comfortable.

Dmitri Dolgov (1:23)

And they're reluctant. But once you get in and you experience the ride, the safety, the comfort of it, people start trusting it, they appreciate the value of it.

SPEAKER_3 (1:34)

Do you remember your own first ride?

I guess you must have had so many first rides in different generations. But do you remember the first one that was perhaps autonomous on the streets of San Francisco, and you feeling as though, oh wow, this works?

Dmitri Dolgov (1:49)

Oh yeah, there's been this whole, it's been getting close to two decades now.

So I've had my sheriff, yeah, first moments. There was the first time when we put a car with no driver. In fact, it didn't even have steering wheel and pedals on public roads. That was in 2015

Then there was, I remember the ride in 2017, when it was a small, like four of us from the team who took a first ride when we started doing regular fully autonomous operations in a Chandler that was on our fourth generation vehicle. I do remember the first time, it was not the first time I took a ride in San Francisco, but I do remember, I think it was around the holiday season, I think it was 2022, where I was using it to get around the city. It was getting close to Christmas. It was busy times, and it was the time where I take a step back and reflect on the year, and I remember walking out of the car, and I'm like, this one is different, and this one, it's like the start of something very real, and okay, I'll give you one more. You got me. Remembering all the interesting first moments. Another one was when we opened up freeways for fully-turned-miss operations, and my wife and I took it together. We had a date night, so we're coming up from Palalta to the city, and you see a whole bunch of Waymos in the city. So it's one of those moments where you take a step back and reflect on how far the industry and our company has gone. So those are definitely memorable.

SPEAKER_3 (3:29)

Yeah. It's incredible. We were just seeing this on the intersection that we just got into the car, but there were six Waymos that we saw right at the intersection.

We'll get into this in the talk later, but how much of a jump is it to go from thinking about just one Waymo that is driving around the city to now thinking of them as a system of agents almost like a multi-agent system? Is there any coordination going on between the Waymos?

Dmitri Dolgov (3:59)

There's definitely coordination. Each one is fully autonomous.

Sure. They don't talk directly to each other, but there's definitely coordination at the fleet level. When you figure out which one is going to go and pick up what passenger when they're getting ready, the fleet is getting ready for your rush hour on a weekday, then of the day or on a Saturday night. There's coordination that some will reposition themselves, others will go back to the depots and get charged up, cleaned up, so there's definitely that. They also share information, not directly, with each other, but I found that one encounters, let's say, in a scene of an accident, it will...