Waymo is scaling through partnerships and broader deployments

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 47:31

   And so, but it's definitely a moonshot and, you know, and, but we are committed to doing that well. I would love to hear the strategy for Waymo because I can see it going a lot of directions. And I'm curious, do you want to keep having these partnerships with the Ubers, et cetera, or will it be the fully vertically integrated Waymo fleet? That's one phase of it. And then I have a question about just selling Waymo vehicles directly to consumers. I'm curious if you've, what those two...

2. 48:00

   buckets. Can Waymo and Uber coexist? And then could I just buy a Waymo car one day and maybe rent it out myself? It's an area where we are so, so far from a zero-sum construct. I think like, you know, it's just like, it's so early. The opportunity space seems so vast to me, so many applications for autonomous driver technology. I expect Waymo to work in a myriad of ways, including with other partners. I expect the other partners to do very well as companies on their own too. So all of that I'm very, very bullish on. The Waymo team, they're very, very focused on scaling up what they are doing. We just crossed half a million paid rights per week. So the team is razor focused on scaling that up.

3. 48:55

   Toronto launch is coming. Yeah, 10 new cities this year, right? And so it's operationally, logistically, scaling up the vehicles, scaling up in more environments, scaling up the customer service, the operations, all with safety being the number one priority. And I think that is what the next 12 months is going to be, more of it, international, other weather conditions, highways, and everywhere scaling up with this high safety bar we have, right, already driving with 95% fewer serious crashes compared to, you know, regular driving.

4. 49:37

   And so that to me is where, through it all, the underlying technology we are building is so general, it has all the option values you're talking about built on top of it. I think everyone is like wondering, where are you going to take that option value? Some people are scared because they have businesses to protect and others are just going, wow, what is the expansion? You know, I would just argue historically, if you've looked at us as a company, I think you've looked at us build Android, mobile, even in the AI ecosystem, we partner with a wide variety of companies. So I think we will always work with the ecosystem. And I think there'll be plenty of growth for everyone to do well.

5. 50:16

   Will I ever be able to buy a Waymo car myself, though? It's not what we are working on at this moment, but never say... Never say never? Never say never. What about Wing?