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- Since John Krafcik became Waymo's CEO in 2015, the company has launched the first standalone commercial chairlift service in the United States.
- As Waymo's ambitions grow, he still has to contend with the haunting attention to detail that autonomous vehicles demand.
- Autonomous cars must be able to manage complex environments such as car parks.
- Parking lots are difficult because they include cars and pedestrians moving in unpredictable patterns and do not carry road markings, Krafcik said.
- Krafcik has been named to the list of 100 people who are transforming the company, according to Business Insider.
- See the complete list of 100 people transforming businesses here.
Since John Krafcik became the CEO of Google's self-driving car project, now called Waymo, in 2015, the company has taken two important steps.
The first took place in 2016, when the company made the first trip in a fully self-driving vehicle on public roads in Austin, Texas. The second followed in 2018, when Waymo launched Waymo One, the first autonomous commercial commercial service launched in the United States, in parts of Arizona.
Waymo One has positioned the company as a leader in the autonomous driving industry, according to consulting and research firm Navigant Research, which, in a report published in 2019, ranked Waymo among companies developing autonomous driving technology in strategy and in execution. And according to a report submitted by Waymo to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, its safety drivers had to manually retake their test cars, for safety reasons, about once every 11,000 km in 2018 – the best price of any company testing autonomous vehicles on public roads in California.
Read more: The 10 people who transform the way the world moves
Increasing the scale of its activities remains a priority for Waymo, as is the expansion of its business to sales of trucks, personal vehicles and equipment. The company owns a group of self-driving trucks, known internally as Husky, and announced in March that it would begin selling lidar sensors to companies that do not compete with Waymo One.
"Anything that has wheels and moves on the surface of the earth is something we could, in the future, imagine being driven by Waymo," said Krafcik.
Attention to detail is essential
As Waymo's ambitions grow, he still has to contend with the haunting attention to detail that autonomous vehicles require. Autonomous cars must be able to handle small details in complex environments, such as parking lots, which are challenging because they depict cars and pedestrians moving in unpredictable patterns and having no road marking, said Krafcik.
Beyond the mastery of technical details, Waymo must also anticipate the preferences of its customers. The company had thought that pbadengers going to a grocery store, for example, would like to be taken care of at the place where they were dropped off – at the main entrance. But the front door is a major source of pedestrian traffic in grocery stores and the pbadengers told Waymo that they felt conscious of loading bags into a car in such a busy place.
"We had rarely thought about very specific things such as: what happens when one of our runners wants to get to the Albertsons grocery store and get dropped off, then be recovered with six bags d & # 39; groceries? " Krafcik said. "It was not obvious."
Krafcik said Waymo had improved the performance of its vehicles on the parking lots, citing this example as a reason why the company was ahead of its competitors.
"I have not heard any other automakers talk about that," Krafcik said.
But Waymo does not try to exploit at all costs its first-mover advantage. Safety is a priority, said Krafcik, a point that the company insists on new employees.
"We must be safe, we must be extremely cautious and methodical in our approach to the market, but we must also be urgent because the world is waiting."
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