After five and a half years of leadership in Waymo, John Krafcik announced on Friday that he would retire from his role, leaving the company to two co-CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov.
Krafcik oversaw the company’s biggest milestones, its renaming to Waymo, partnerships and the acquisition of external financing, while leading enthusiasm through the ranks. But Krafcik’s departure indicates a long and difficult reality check for early hype and hopes to magnify self-driving vehicles.
“If you look at the last year and a half, there is a growing realization in almost all the businesses that develop autonomous vehicles that this is a much more difficult problem than we thought,” said Sam Abuelsamid, chief analyst at Guidehouse Insights. Told CNBC on Friday. “It was not so long ago that people projected that by 2020 we would have robots everywhere. It is not yet clear.”
Abuelsamid said Krafcik’s commitments and experience in the automotive industry – he was previously president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America – helped Waymo enter into critical partnerships with automakers, including Fiat Chrysler and Volvo.
In 2020, he got the more than ten-year-old company its first round of financing – a $ 2.25 billion round of financing led by Silicon Valley investment firms, including Silver Lake. Then it raised another $ 750 million. He also oversaw the launch of a local freight delivery service called Waymo Via, and recently launched the first fully self-driving car service available to some residents in Phoenix, Arizona.
Krafcik takes the reins in 2015, and in 2016 he led Waymo to a consortium in the industry to accelerate self-driving cars. The Alphabet company became a founding member of the group, called the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which includes Argo AI, Aurora, Cruise, Ford, Uber, Volvo and Zoox.
Because Krafcik knows the business and back of the scale of cars, he did not deviate from reality. Even less in recent years.
Self-driving minibus close-up, with LIDAR and other sensor units and logo visible, part of Google parent company Alphabet Inc, driving past the historic railroad station with signposted Mountain View, in Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, with safety driver visible, 28 October 2018.
Smith Collection / Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Under Alphabet’s umbrella “Other Bets”, the company was constantly bleeding money, which is less accepted since Ruth Porat joined the then company as chief financial officer and tightened the wallets. The Other Bets segment showed an operating loss of $ 4.48 billion in 2020. That was an increase of $ 2.03 billion in 2019. Covid also took its toll on the operations, as CNBC recently found Waymo is not sure he can afford to continue paying some workers pandemic.
Krafcik’s departure comes before the expected federal regulations in the US regarding self-driving cars.
The National Transportation Safety Board recently called on its sister agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to set stricter standards for automotive vehicle technology. NHTSA requested prior comment from the public for the proposed arrangement and closed the comment period on April 1st.
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 secure the world, the cities in which we operate and the regulators who regulate those cities. understand our technology. ‘
Krafcik, however, was no stranger to those who dominated reality when self-driving cars would be available. Waymo and Krafcik assured the press and the public that the technology was coming fast, dating back to 2012, when it was still known as Google’s self-driving car project.
Krafcik said in 2017 that it would not have to wait until 2020 – when analysts expected self-driving cars to be autonomous – but that it would give drivers the ability within ‘months’.
“Fully self-driving cars are here,” Krafcik said during the 2017 Web Summit in Lisbon, where he presented a video of a man falling asleep in one of the Waymo vehicles. “It’s not happening in 2020, it’s happening today.”
What he did not explain at the time was how early in the test it was still and what obstacles it still presented.
In recent years, the company began to shift its enthusiastic tone when it fell behind the original timeline for complete self-driving cars on the road.
In 2019, CNBC reported that Waymo still relies heavily on human safety managers and still needs a decent amount of community purchasing. Shortly afterwards, Morgan Stanley downgraded its valuation of Waymo by 40%, from $ 175 billion to $ 105 billion, saying it underestimated the company’s great confidence in human managers.
In 2019, Waymo’s chief operating officer and now current CEO Tekedra Mawakana said at a conference that the hype surrounding his self-driving cars had become ‘unmanageable’.
That year, Krafcik began to temper the rhetoric a bit and poured cooler water on the subject at a meeting of the National Governors Association in 2019. By the end of the year, the company had consolidated its operations in Detroit and Phoenix and its factory in Austin in Texas, which affected about 100 employees, CNBC found.
With more than 20 million miles driven on public roads and 20 billion miles driven in simulation, Waymo leads other companies in self-driving technology. But it still has a long way to go if it wants to scale, even if Krafcik helped move it further.
“I think he might have seen it as a good time to step aside,” Abuelsamid said. “He has put the company on the right track. And maybe he’s just tired of the fight and wants to do something else for a while. ‘
Krafcik did not respond to a request for comment.
Lora Kolodny of CNBC contributed to this article.
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