Waymo

My most recent fascination is Waymo, the autonomous driving startup. For many years, there has been speculation on when self-driving cars will get on the road. Waymo’s public launch in Phoenix,AZ settles the question — it’s finally here!

The podcast with Dmitri Dolgov, CTO of Waymo is really interesting. In talking about the future of Waymo, he says that Waymo’s launch in Phoenix provides a testbed to create a playbook to scale the fleet service across the entire country. He talks about how Waymo is improving its service along three axes:

• Core Technology — Hardware and Software:
• Evaluation and Deployment
• Operational Excellence

I suggest you watch the podcast — it’s worth the time.

Waymo is not the only company working on self-driving cars. There is Cruise, Zoox, Tesla and a whole host of other startups working on it. It is likely in a decade, car ownership will go away. Instead we will have a combination of fleet services for local commute+ autonomous car rental for long distance trips.

The implications of self-driving technology are quite significant. The second largest ‘employer’ after Walmart is Uber and in 29 of the 50 states, the most popular job is truck driving. Waymo wants to replace both of these. I have been deeply fascinated by general topic of automation and ensuing destruction of job, self-driving tech is just one piece of the larger jigsaw puzzle of automation. Will interesting to see how this one plays out.