Waymo’s Tekedra Mawakana on Scaling Self-Driving Beyond the Hype (techcrunch.com)

Waymo co‑CEO Tekedra Mawakana will appear on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 stage for a reality check on autonomous vehicles, focusing less on flashy demos or timelines and more on what it actually takes to scale self‑driving systems. Her session promises an inside look at operational realities—rider safety, building public trust, regulatory compliance, and competitive pressure from companies like Tesla—framing Waymo’s progress as a case study in moving autonomy from pilots to mass deployment. For the AI/ML community this is significant because scaling AVs exposes core research problems as engineering constraints: robust perception and sensor fusion across edge cases, simulation-to-reality transfer, continuous fleet learning, long‑tail validation, telemetry and rollback systems, and regulatory-grade explainability and logging. Mawakana’s perspective highlights how research, product, and operations must converge—model validation, data pipelines, deployment orchestration, and safety metrics aren’t academic exercises but production requirements. Founders, engineers, and investors will get practical signals about where investment and research are most needed to bring autonomous mobility to market at scale.