Waymo
A fully driverless ride-hailing service that operates autonomous cars in select US cities.
Waymo built a fully driverless Level 4 system from day one, then spent years and about $10 to 15 billion before paid service began in October 2020. It reports over 10 million paid rides and 91% fewer serious injury crashes than humans. Riders adapt within minutes. Lesson: where safety is non-negotiable, raise the MVP bar, design for predictability, and keep small controls like music and temperature.
What was said about Waymo
Waymo is a sensor-filled electric car that can carry more than rides. Tony Fadell describes Waymo as an electric car full of sensors. He treats it as a hardware platform that could later carry delivery or other services.
Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)
Built as a fully driverless Level 4 system from day one, so predictability and trust were designed in. It is a paid service in Phoenix and open to the public in San Francisco, with LA testing under way, and the car now slows on downhill streets like human drivers do.
Waymo is a sensor-filled electric car that can carry more than rides. Tony Fadell describes Waymo as an electric car full of sensors. He treats it as a hardware platform that could later carry delivery or other services.
Tony Fadell: How to build real taste (and why AI makes it matter more)
Tony describes it as an electric car full of sensors, a hardware platform that could later carry delivery or other services.
Tony Xu of DoorDash: Surviving 1,000 Days of Startup Hell
Waymo is a DoorDash partner in the Phoenix area. Robotaxis get the capital and attention, but they solve a different problem from last-mile delivery.
Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI?
It passed the Larry 1000 milestone in 18 months, but commercial service took until October 2020. It reports 91% fewer serious injury crashes than humans, over 10 million paid rides, and about $10 to 15 billion spent.
How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)
McCabe cites it as crashing 3.5 times less than human drivers, with no wrong turns or hygiene problems, as an example of AI doing personal tasks better than humans.
OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
A first ride goes from panic to checking email within about 15 minutes. It shows how a miracle quickly becomes ordinary, and Weil lists it among his product picks.
Becoming an AI PM | Aman Khan (Arize AI, ex-Spotify, Apple, Cruise)
Even though it is fully self-driving, riders still control the air conditioning and music, an example of leaving knobs and levers so people feel in control.
A conversation with OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil, Anthropic's CPO Mike Krieger, and Sarah Guo
A first-time rider went from panic at a bicyclist to scrolling a phone within 10 minutes, showing how fast people adapt to magic.
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