“Move fast, break things” may be the last startup proverb a driverless car company wants to adopt.
During a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Tuesday, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said scaling is “imperative” for the Alphabet-backed company.
That doesn’t mean Waymo is deploying robotaxis at the expense of safety, she said.
The co-CEO was asked if there were incidents that could cause Waymo to pump the brakes on scaling in cities or on highways, a route that hasn’t yet been greenlit for its public robotaxi service.
“We’re always using our same safety framework to determine what is safe enough,” she said. “And just because we say ‘yes’ doesn’t mean we don’t pull back. We pull back all the time.”
Mawakana said a “safety-first” approach is deeply ingrained in the company culture.
“I’ve been at the company eight and a half years and, for a very long time, it’s been very clear: Anyone can raise their hand and say, ‘Wait a minute, I don’t understand this,'” the co-CEO said. “That’s something we all take very seriously, and you can’t go back and build that.”
Mawakana pointed to the case of Waymo cars blocking emergency vehicles, which have been documented on social media.
“We’ve done tests and tests and tests with emergency vehicles, sirens, and [whether] we can hear them. Do we understand what’s happening? And yet, we found ourselves blocking some emergency vehicles, and that’s not OK, right?” she said. “That’s something where we had to pull back and really focus on it.”
Waymo says, in self-published safety reports online, that its self-driving technology has shown 91% fewer crashes that result in serious injuries or worse compared to the average human driving over the same distance within Waymo’s operational areas.
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A Business Insider analysis of data Waymo provided to the California Public Utilities Commission showed that the rate of collisions had decreased 95% when comparing a three-month period in 2022 and 2025.
However, the robotaxis are still not immune to mistakes.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said this month that the agency was conducting a preliminary investigation into a media report of a Waymo robotaxi failing to stop behind a school bus with children disembarking.
“In the incident, the Waymo AV approached the right side of the stopped school bus from a perpendicular side street,” the NHTSA report said. “The AV initially stopped, but then drove around the front of the bus by briefly turning right to avoid running into the bus’s right front end, then turning left to pass in front of the bus, and then turning further left and driving down the roadway past the entire left side of the bus.”
Mawakana said at the conference that a software update will be rolled out to address the issue.
“Thankfully, in this edge case, we were never close to presenting harm to those children,” she said. “And that’s not the standard. The standard is we have to keep getting better, we have to keep improving the system. That should not happen.”
A Waymo spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
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