Waymo had a big year in 2024.
The Alphabet-owned AV tech company reached 150,000 paid trips per week on its ride-hailing service, completed more than 4 million rides, expanded its service area, and saw one of its biggest competitors bite the dust.
During a keynote conversation with Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow at CES 2025, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana had a message to share about Waymo’s 2025 ambitions: “Stay tuned. This is a really exciting time for autonomy.”
Who’s right?
One of Waymo’s would-be competitors in the robotaxi business is Tesla, which is preparing to debut its “Cybercab.” Tesla has taken a markedly different approach to AV tech than its competitors; it relies solely on cameras rather than on the various other types of sensors that companies like Waymo use to build redundancies into their AV systems.
Asked about Waymo’s strategy versus Tesla’s, Mawakana said the issue isn’t a matter of debate within Waymo. Instead, she said, Waymo is focused on integrating large language models with visual language models to “create an end-to-end, very, very robust, and large end-to-end system that’s multi-modal in its foundation so that perception planning and prediction…can become even more robust than it is today.” Waymo, she said, is focused on using AI advancements to improve its system.
“Race to the bottom”
One of the hot topics at CES was the AV sector’s support for the federal government establishing a federal regulatory framework for driverless vehicles. Broadly, the sector is optimistic that the incoming Trump administration will adopt a standard that makes it easier to deploy AVs across the US. Right now, AVs primarily are regulated state by state.
Mawakana expressed support for such a standard, but cautioned that it could lead to a “race to the bottom on safety.”
“As far as a national framework, that would be great,” Mawakana said. “It’s just that that framework should require people to demonstrate their safety record.”
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Waymo released a data hub on its website that provides information about its safety record. The company claims that across 33 million miles, it’s had 81% fewer airbag deployment crashes, 78% fewer injury-causing crashes, and 62% fewer police-reported crashes compared to similar trips made by human drivers.
Mawakana was coy about her views on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s possible influence over how a federal framework comes together, but expressed optimism that the new administration will be motivated to work with the AV sector on common goals.
“The [first Trump] administration was very forward-leaning on advancing AVs,” she said. “Globally, the race around autonomous vehicles has matured. And so this is a real opportunity for US leadership. So enabling safe, sustainable transportation that’s autonomous is very aligned with what I think this administration will want to do.”
Big ambitions
As for what 2025 has in store, Waymo is teaming up with Uber to debut commercial operations in Austin and Atlanta. It plans to begin operations in Miami. It’s expanding to Japan. And there could be new cities added to its roster soon.
“One of the things you’ll see from us this year is testing across a host of cities, so that we can launch over the next couple of years, throughout the US and internationally,” Mawakana said.
She also suggested that Waymo may at some point renew its pursuit of other businesses beyond ride-hailing, including local delivery, long-haul trucking, and licensing its tech to automakers.
“This isn’t a winner-takes-all, Waymo-does-it-all approach,” Mawakana said. “This is coming up with the technology, thinking about how many trillions of miles are traveled, and then figuring out the best partnership approach to scaling our technology.”