After five-and-a-half years leading Waymo, John Krafcik announced on Friday that he was stepping down, leaving the company to two co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov.
Krafcik oversaw the company’s major milestones, his rebranding to Waymo, partnerships and fundraising, while driving enthusiasm. But Krafcik’s departure signals a long and difficult reality check to advertise early and to hope for the escalation of self-driving vehicles.
“If we look at the last year and a half – it’s been growing in almost every car development company that this is a much harder problem than we thought,” Sam Abuelsamid, chief analyst at Guidehouse Insights for CNBC, said Friday. “Not long ago, people projected that we would have robot taxis everywhere by 2020. That didn’t work out clearly enough.”
Abuelsamid said Krafcik’s connections and experience in the automotive industry – he was previously president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America – helped Waymo establish critical partnerships with automakers, including Fiat Chrysler and Volvo.
In 2020, the 10-year-old obtained its first round of external financing – a $ 2.25 billion financing round led by Silicon Valley investment firms, including Silver Lake. Then he raised another $ 750 million. He also oversaw the launch of a local delivery service with freight partners, called Waymo Via, and recently began its first full-service car service that some residents can order in Phoenix, Arizona.
Krafcik took the reins in 2015 and in 2016 led Waymo to join an industrial consortium to accelerate self-driving cars. Alphabet became a founding member of the group, called the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which included Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Ford, Uber, Volvo and Zoox.
Knowing the business and the back of car scaling, Krafcik did not stray from reality. All the less so in recent years.
Close-up of a self-driving minivan with LIDAR and other visible sensor and logo units, part of parent company Google Alphabet Inc, which drives past the historic Mountain View Railroad Station in Mountain View, California , from Silicon Valley, definitely visible driver, October 28, 2018.
Smith / Gado Collection | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Under Alphabet’s “Other Bets” umbrella, the company has been constantly bleeding money, which is less accepted since Ruth Porat joined the company as chief financial officer and packed her bags. The Other Betting segment showed an operating loss of $ 4.48 billion in 2020. It rose from $ 2.03 billion in 2019. Covid also had a tax on operations, as CNBC recently discovered that Waymo did not he was sure he could afford to pay some pandemic workers.
Krafcik’s departure comes ahead of expected US federal regulations regarding self-driving cars.
The National Council for Transport Safety recently asked its source agency, the National Administration for Highway Traffic Safety, to impose stricter standards regarding automatic vehicle technology. The NHTSA requested comments from the public prior to the proposed development and closed the comment period on 1 April.
Krafcik is aware of what is at stake.
After a pedestrian was hit and killed by a semi-autonomous Uber vehicle in Arizona in 2018, Krafcik told CNBC that part of his responsibility at Waymo is “to make sure that the world, the cities where we operate and the authorities regulatory governing these cities understand our technology. ”
However, Krafcik was no stranger to overlapping reality when self-driving cars became available. Waymo and Krafcik assured the press and the public that the technology is coming fast, dating back to 2012, when it was still known as the Google autonomous car project.
Krafcik said in 2017 that he would not have to wait until 2020 – when analysts expected self-driving cars to become fully autonomous – but that he would give riders the ability within “months”.
“There are completely autonomous cars here,” Krafcik said at the 2017 Lisbon Web Summit, where he presented a video of a man falling asleep in one of Waymo’s vehicles. “It’s not happening in 2020, it’s happening today.”
What he did not explain at the time was how early the test was and what obstacles he faced.
In recent years, the company has begun to form its enthusiastic tone, as it has lagged behind the initial timeline to get cars with full driving on the road.
In 2019, CNBC reports found that Waymo still relies heavily on human safety drivers and still requires a decent amount of community acceptance. Shortly thereafter, Morgan Stanley downgraded its valuation for Waymo by 40 percent 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 newcomer CEO Tekedra Mawakana told a conference that the hype surrounding its self-driving cars has become “unmanageable.”
That year, Krafcik began to temper his rhetoric a bit, pouring colder water on the subject at a 2019 National Association of Governors meeting. , affecting about 100 workers, CNBC found.
With more than 20 million miles traveled on public roads and 20 billion miles traveled in simulation, Waymo leads other companies in self-driving technology. But she still has a long way to go if she wants to expand, even though Krafcik helped her move on.
“I think maybe he saw this as a good time to step aside,” Abuelsamid said. “He’s got the company on the right track. And maybe he’s tired of fighting and he wants to go do something else for a while.”
Krafcik did not respond to requests for comment.
CNora’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this article.
Watch now: This city in Arizona is overtaken by cars driven by Waymo