Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo, and journalist Kirsten Korosec speak onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 at Moscone Center on Oct. 27, 2025, in San Francisco. Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana believes that in the future, one bad crash would not topple her growing self-driving car company, she said Monday, in a signal of confidence about the public’s changing faith in autonomous vehicles.
The topic of a fatal robotaxi crash came up during Mawakana’s interview with Kristen Korosec, TechCrunch’s transportation editor, during the first day of the outlet’s annual Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Korosec asked Mawakana about Waymo’s ambitions and got answer after answer about the company’s all-consuming focus on safety.
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The most interesting part of the interview arrived when Korosec brought on a thought experiment. What if self-driving vehicles like Waymo and others reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the United States, but a self-driving vehicle does eventually cause a fatal crash, Korosec pondered. Or as she put it to the executive: “Will society accept that? Will society accept a death potentially caused by a robot?”
“I think that society will,” Mawakana answered, slowly, before positioning the question as an industrywide issue. “I think the challenge for us is making sure that society has a high enough bar on safety that companies are held to.”
She said that companies should be transparent about their records by publishing data about how many crashes they’re involved in, and she pointed to the “hub” of safety information on Waymo’s website. Self-driving cars will dramatically reduce crashes, Mawakana said, but not by 100%: “We have to be in this open and honest dialogue about the fact that we know it’s not perfection.”
Circling back to the idea of a fatal crash, she said, “We really worry as a company about those days. You know, we don’t say ‘whether.’ We say ‘when.’ And we plan for them.”
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Korosec followed up, asking if there had been safety issues that prompted Waymo to “pump the breaks” on its expansion plans throughout the years. The co-CEO said the company pulls back and retests “all the time,” pointing to challenges with blocking emergency vehicles as an example.
“We need to make sure that the performance is backing what we’re saying we’re doing,” she said.
Cruise, the autonomous car company that famously spiraled into collapse after one of its vehicles dragged a San Francisco pedestrian and the company hid video from regulators and the press, went unmentioned during the chat. But at the interview’s end, Korosec and Mawakana returned to the point about transparency on self-driving vehicles’ performance, and the Waymo co-CEO threw some shade at her competitors, including Tesla. She said she doesn’t think any other company is meeting the bar.
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