Dmitri Dolgov: commitment

Transcript context

…Just that waiting for the car, it should be nice just in the garage there and keep your stuff in it and everything. It's not the first time you've heard that request. It seems to me operationally very intensive and very hard. A self-driving car is actually not self-driving, it takes a village. You have all of the human operator ready to step in. There was that thundering herd incident that you guys talked about in San Francisco that highlighted that for people. Then there's just keeping the cars clean and keeping everything running in that regard. Can you describe just what the operational infrastructure that sits behind Waymo looks like? Sure. I will say that we are overall in all of those areas on a path of increasing efficiency and automation. The number of manual steps that one had to do five years ago to launch a Waymo, versus where we are today, is drastically different. But nowadays, if you look at one of our depots as a fully, automatically orchestrated dance of autonomous vehicles. The way it looks like today is cars will automatically go to pick up their riders, serve their trips. If for some reason they need to come back, maybe they're low on energy, maybe somebody left a mess in the car, they will automatically come to the depot. If it is, so cleaning today is a manual process. It'll get flagged, and the car. We have fleet management systems say, "Hey, car number 378 needs cleaning." Actually, on the sensor dome, we're able to display icons. We'll show you like a little emoji. They'll put their hand up, yeah.…

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