After five-and-a-half years leading Waymo, John Krafcik announced on Friday that he would leave his role, leaving the company to two co-directors Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov.
Krafcik has overseen the company’s most important milestones, its brand change to Waymo, partnerships and has raised external funds, while leading enthusiasm across the ranks. But Krafcik’s exit points to a harsh and arduous reality check to advertise early and expect to climb vehicles with automatic driving.
“If we look at the last year and a half: almost every company that develops autonomous vehicles finds that this is a much more difficult problem than we thought,” Sam Abuelsamid, chief analyst at Guidehouse Insights on CNBC said on Friday. “It wasn’t so long ago that people projected that we would have robotaxis everywhere in 2020. This hasn’t been evidenced quite clearly.”
Abuelsamid said Krafcik’s connections and experience within the automotive industry – former president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America – helped Waymo establish critical alliances with automakers, including Fiat Chrysler and Volvo.
In 2020, it secured the company’s more than ten-year first round of external financing: a $ 2.25 million round of financing led by Silicon Valley investment firms, including Silver Lake. He then raised another $ 750 million. He also oversaw the launch of a local delivery service with freight partners, called Waymo Via, and recently launched its first fully autonomous driving service that some residents may request in Phoenix, Arizona.
Krafcik took the reins in 2015 and in 2016 led Waymo to join an industry consortium to accelerate cars with automatic driving. The Alphabet company became a founding member of the group, called the Autonomous Coalition for Safer Streets, which included Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Ford, Uber, Volvo and Zoox.
Knowing the business and the end of the car ladder, Krafcik has not strayed from reality. Even less so in recent years.
Close-up of a self-driving minivan, with LIDAR and other visible sensor and logo units, which is part of the parent company of Google Alphabet Inc, which drives past the historic train station with signs that say Mountain View , in the city of Mountain View, California, in Silicon Valley visible driver, October 28, 2018.
Smith / Gado Collection | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Under Alphabet’s “Other Bets” umbrella, the company has been bleeding money constantly, which is less accepted since Ruth Porat joined the company as chief financial officer and adjusted the ropes of the bag. The Other Betting segment showed an operating loss of $ 4.488 billion in 2020. This increased from $ 2.03 billion in 2019. Covid has also gained weight in operations, as CNBC recently found that Waymo was unsafe. of allowing the payment of some workers in the midst of the pandemic.
Krafcik’s departure is ahead of federal regulations in the United States on autonomous cars.
Recently, the National Transportation Safety Board called on its sister agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to impose stricter rules on automatic vehicle technology. NHTSA requested feedback from the public prior to the proposed rulemaking and closed the comment period on April 1st.
Krafcik is aware of what is at stake.
After an Uber semi-autonomous pedestrian ran over a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018, Krafcik told CNBC that part of his responsibility at Waymo is to “make sure the world, the cities where we operate and the regulators that regulate those cities understand our technology “.
However, Krafcik was no stranger to those who overexpressed the reality of when there would be autonomous cars. Waymo and Krafcik assured the press and the public that the technology would arrive quickly, as it dates back to 2012, when it was still known as Google’s autonomous car project.
Krafcik said in 2017 that there would be no need to wait until 2020 when, when analysts expected self-driving cars to pass completely autonomous goal, but that it would give drivers the chance in “months”.
“There are fully autonomous vehicles,” Krafcik said at the 2017 Web Summit in Lisbon, where he presented a video of a man who fell asleep in one of the Waymo vehicles. “It doesn’t happen in 2020, it happens today.”
What he didn’t explain at the time was how early the test was still and what obstacles he still had ahead of him.
In recent years, the company began to set its enthusiastic tone as it lagged behind its original timeline to achieve fully autonomous cars on the road.
In 2019, CNBC reports found that Waymo still relied heavily on human safety drivers and still needed a decent amount of community acceptance. Shortly afterwards, Morgan Stanley downgraded its valuation on Waymo by 40% from $ 175 billion to $ 105 billion, saying it underestimated the company’s heavy reliance on human drivers.
In 2019, Waymo’s chief operating officer and now new CEO Tekedra Mawakana said at a conference that the hype surrounding his autonomous cars became “unmanageable”.
That year, Krafcik began to temper his rhetoric a bit, pouring cooler water on the subject at a 2019 National Association of Governors meeting. Towards the end of the year, the company consolidated its operations in Detroit and Phoenix, closing its facilities in Austin, Texas, affecting about 100 workers, found CNBC.
With more than 20 million kilometers traveled on public roads and 20 billion kilometers traveled in simulation, Waymo leads other companies in automatic driving technology. But, he still has a long way to go if he wants to climb, even if Krafcik helped him advance.
“I think maybe he saw this as a good time to put it aside,” Abuelsamid said. “He’s put the company on the right track. And maybe he’s just tired of the fight and wants to go do something else for a while.”
Krafcik did not respond to a request for comment.
CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this article.
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