You’ve made deals recently to stock the fleet with plug-in hybrids like the Pacifica and all-electrics like the Jaguar i-Pace. I’m wondering if there’s something about electric vehicles that makes them particularly good for the kind of project Waymo’s engaged in.

We’re a very green company at Waymo, and we would love nothing more than 100% zero-emission vehicles in our fleet. So going forward all the new vehicles that we’ll put into the Waymo fleet are going to be zero-emission vehicles—like the i-Pace, which is a great vehicle with a huge battery pack and is able to drive very efficiently. We’re finding that EVs are super safe. They have great crash test ratings, they have a low center of gravity. They’re also very quiet, which is good for user experience. You don’t have that noisy internal combustion engine.

I think, in cities, we’re going to increasingly see areas where internal combustion engines are not allowed. [The decision to stock EVs] gives us some some future proofing against cities saying, We want to have clean air where the majority of our people are living and so only zero emission vehicles will be allowed here.

What’s the longest trip anyone’s ever taken and driverless Waymo, as far as you know?

Great question. I don’t know the answer. Early in our project, in year one or year two, Larry Page famously gave the team ten 100-mile challenges to drive really insanely complicated routes in full driverless mode, but with a test driver in the driver’s seat. And the team successfully completed ten 100-mile rides way back when. One of them was driving from Mountain View up to San Francisco and back on El Camino, with 240 stoplights. Driving up to Lake Tahoe, driving around Lake Tahoe, driving to Santa Cruz, things like this.

Those were interesting trophies back in the day. But one of the subtleties of this is, the challenge isn’t necessarily where you think it might be. It turns out that driving in a crowded Walmart parking lot is probably harder than driving from here to San Francisco and back.

Where do you want to see Weymo in 10 years? And where do you want to see the driving ecosystem generally?

I would love for us, more than anything else, to have a material impact on fatalities and injuries on roads. Somehow finding a way that this technology can be part of universal mobility and access for all. Lack of access to mobility is one of the things that keeps societies divided—not everyone has transportation at their disposal to get to places where jobs are, or where education is. In 10 years, we have the opportunity to bring the cost of transportation and mobility down significantly. Health and safety—most important. But also reducing social barriers. If we get this right, we can have a material impact on that.

An average American drives maybe 10,000 or 13,000 miles per year in their car. Our cars may drive 80,000 to 100,000 miles per year. So we have this opportunity for a 5x or 6x impact on emissions with each car that we’re driving, if we can replace internal-combustion-engine-driven models. A massive impact on CO2 production. EVs are gonna be good for the planet no matter what; personally owned EVs are good for the planet. But shared EVs are five to six times better for the planet if they’re displacing internal combustion engine models.

Who do you think we should talk to next in this series?

A fellow named Larry Burns. Larry was a General Motors executive in charge of product development and product planning for many years prior to the great recession. He and his team had some extraordinary ideas about the future of the automobile and the architecture of the automobile. The vehicle they showed 20 years ago, called Autonomy, was the precursor to Tesla. In a way, GM had this all figured out. Larry was one of the real revolutionaries in the company to imagine this. He just wrote a book called Autonomy, which is fabulous fun to read, talking about the early days of the self driving car world up until today at Waymo. He’s just a delightful human.