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Cyberpunk dystopia is arriving soon near you.
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana delivered a stunning admission at TechCrunch Disrupt recently, telling attendees that a robotaxi fatality isn’t just possible, it’s guaranteed. Mawakana stated that the company plans for “when,” not “whether,” a Waymo vehicle will eventually kill someone. I think this admission is nightmare fuel for anyone who already distrusts how aggressively these cars were rolled out onto public streets. It’s one thing to understand the risks; it’s another to hear the company’s leader essentially shrug and say, “Yeah, people will die, and we’re ready for it.”
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As reported by Daily Dot, Mawakana told the audience that the company is actively bracing for the first robotaxi fatality. She didn’t mince words when responding to a question about how society will react to a Waymo killing, saying, “You know, we don’t say ‘whether.’ We say ‘when.’ And we plan for them.”
I have to say, that sounds pretty callous and out of touch, even if it’s technically true that human-driven cars cause tens of thousands of deaths every year. Mawakana did try to assure the audience that she believes the public will ultimately accept the inevitable deaths when they happen. She stressed that the challenge for Waymo is “making sure that society has a high enough bar on safety that companies are held to.”
Public safety isn’t too high on Waymo’s priority list
While the CEO’s admission is certainly alarming, Waymo wants you to focus on their data, which they claim proves their technology is overwhelmingly safe. According to Waymo’s own data, which they released in September 2025, their driverless vehicles are 91 percent safer than those operated by human drivers. A Waymo spokesperson shared some specific numbers via email, stating that over 96 million rider-only miles, the Waymo Driver has been involved in “11x fewer serious injury crashes, 5x fewer crashes with airbag deployment, and 5x fewer injury-causing crashes.”
There are reasons to be skeptical of those numbers, though. Waymo has every incentive to “cook those numbers,” as the saying goes. Plus, that data doesn’t account for some of the bigger public safety issues we’ve seen, like Waymo cars blocking emergency vehicles. Complaints about Waymo cars running red lights and engaging in other unsafe actions have gone viral over the past year, and that kind of behavior is really concerning.
Unsurprisingly, the public responded to the CEO’s quote with serious anti-bot vitriol. Distrust in self-driving cars is already high, and many people feel this technology was pushed onto the public without consent. It really doesn’t matter how you phrase it; there’s simply no way to say, “Our product will kill people,” without massive backlash.
After all, public transportation is already much less likely to kill people, and it reduces emissions and traffic congestion while costing much less than any Waymo ride. I think that’s a top-tier point we should all be considering.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
Published: Nov 20, 2025 05:00 pm