TED Talks Daily Waymo's case for a driverless future | Tekedra Mawakana, Sal Khan
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May 11, 2026 
Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo and leader in autonomous vehicle development, makes the case for fully driverless cars. She discusses Waymo's scale and safety data. She explains regulation and rollout choices. She explores transit integration, job transitions, and how self-driving cars could reshape cities and daily life.
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Waymo Already Runs At Human‑lifetime Scale
- Waymo operates at scale with ~3,000 cars and targets 1 million trips per week by year-end, driving over 4 million miles per week.
- Tekedra Mawakana compares this to six human driving lifetimes per week and notes presence in 11 U.S. cities plus London and Tokyo testing.
Waymo Claims Superhuman Safety Compared To Humans
- Based on 170 million miles of data, Waymo reports a 13x reduction in serious injury-causing crashes and is just over 10x safer than a human.
- Mawakana frames this as 'superhuman performance' achieved through large-scale driving data accumulation.
The Real Risk Is Accepting Road Deaths As Normal
- Mawakana argues the real danger is the status quo: ~40,000 U.S. and ~1.2 million global road deaths annually that society treats as normal.
- She emphasizes urgency to deploy safer tech and the challenge that people are complacent about accepted road fatalities.