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- [00:10]
David Brown
It's February 2018 and the federal courthouse in San Francisco is bracing for one of the biggest tech showdowns of the decade. In just a few hours, Waymo and Uber will square off in a trial that threatens to expose the deepest secrets of Silicon Valley's self driving revolution. Reporters crowd the hallway clutching notepads and camera gear. Lawyers from both companies move briskly through security carrying boxes stuffed with exhibits and confidential filings. And there is one person everyone is waiting to hear from today. Anthony Lewandowski. Once one of Google's brightest robotics stars. He's the reason for this legal showdown. Waymo, Google's self driving car division is accusing Uber of orchestrating a calculated theft of its trade secrets. A heist worth in Waymo $1.8 billion. The allegations are explosive. Waymo says Lewandowski stole around 14,000 proprietary files, nearly 10 gigabytes of designs and engineering documents before leaving Google in early 2016 and joining Uber. Soon after, Waymo discovered the theft almost by accident. In December 2016, a Waymo engineer was mistakenly copied on an email from a parts. Attached was an image of a circuit board Uber had ordered. It was almost identical to Waymo's own confidential design. Waymo conducted a forensic investigation and what they found was damning. A massive download from Lewandowski's account several weeks before he quit. They believe Lewandowski then tried to cover his tracks, installing a new operating system to reformat his laptop and erase any forensic fingerprints. Waymo is convinced that Uber used the stolen files to speed up its own lidar development. A charge Uber denies. Uber's defense is blunt. Its engineers built their own system, the designs don't match and no one can own the future of self driving cars. But the optics are terrible. And while lawyers argue over patents and trade secrets, Uber's autonomous SUVs are already on the streets of Pittsburgh and Phoenix racking up test miles as the company scrambles to close Google's decade long head start. Now, on the eve of trial, the stakes couldn't be higher. After 10 years of research, secrecy and invention, Waymo, the company that helped create the self driving car, is no longer racing ahead. It's fighting to protect the very technology it pioneered. From wondery. I'm david brown and this is business wars. In the last episode, Google launched a top secret project to build a self driving car. After years of research, it unveiled Waymo, a new company promising to put robo taxis on the world's streets. Now Uber and others are racing to catch up. By hook or by crook. This is episode two. Driving Too Fast. It's March 2017, and while the lawsuit with Waymo intensifies, Uber's self driving project is making progress in California. The state's Department of Motor Vehicles has finally given the company approval to resume testing its self driving SUVs on the streets of San Francisco, albeit with a human safety driver behind the wheel and absolutely no paying passengers. It's a comeback for the ride hailing company and a reminder of just how chaotic Uber's rush into autonomous driving has been. The company first put its experimental Volvos on the road in September 2016, offering test rides to paying passengers in Pittsburgh and soon after in Tempe, Arizona. The goal was clear. Catch up to Waymo and do it fast. Then came California. Instead of waiting for a permit, Uber began testing its cars in San Francisco without the required state approvals. The decision saved time, but soon backfired. Within days, video clips surfaced showing the cars running red lights at busy intersections. Hey, you know we've seen this before. A video clip that says what others might be thinking. For its critics, Uber seems to be treating regulation like a speed bump, not a guardrail. But this isn't so much a Silicon Valley problem as a problem in business more broadly. Many young companies think cutting corners buys time, but more often, it just buys trouble. Later on, California's Department of Motor Vehicles ordered Uber's robot fleet off the road. Uber argued that the rules shouldn't apply because its car still had a human safety driver behind the wheel, someone who was paid to sit in the driver's seat and take over if something went wrong. The state regulator didn't buy, classified the vehicles as autonomous and revoked their registrations. So in December 2016, Uber's self driving cars were loaded onto trucks and taken to Arizona, where Governor Doug Ducey, eager to turn the state into a haven for innovation, welcomed them with open arms. Two months later, Uber suffered another blow when Waymo filed a lawsuit claiming that its one time protege, Anthony Levandowski, had stolen trade secrets before defecting. For most companies, this might have been a fatal one, two punch. But under CEO Travis Kalanick, Uber still plays by his favorite rule, ask forgiveness, not permission. So after being banished from San Francisco, the company applied for the proper permits. Now, with state approval in hand, its autonomous cars are back on the streets, this time under strict oversight. Uber's gamble has paid off. For now. But while Uber is moving fast and breaking rules along the way, Waymo is moving slow, steady, and sure. You know, seems like every industry has its hares and its tortoises the flashy players may get all the headlines, but the patient ones often get durability. Going slow doesn't mean falling behind. It often means fighting fewer fires compared to the competition. In fact, for a small business, consistency can be a competitive advantage all of its own. And in the long haul, markets tend to reward reliability more often than they reward dramatic. It's 2017 and the sun is beating down on a wide strip of tarmac outside a police training yard in Chandler, Arizona. Waymo's pale gray Chrysler Pacifica minivans are parked in neat rows, their rooftop sensors glinting like helmets in the heat. It's a peaceful scene. Then all hell breaks loose. A wall of sound erupts from every direction. Police cruisers scream in from one end of the lot. Fire engines roar past in the opposite direction while ambulances weave through the chaos. Red and blue lights flash across the minivan's curved panels. Inside a nearby tent, engineers stare at their monitors, watching as the vehicles microphones and lidar feeds erupt in color and noise. This is Waymo's first emergency vehicle test day, and the mission is simple but nerve wracking. Find out whether the world's most cautious robot cars can navigate a full blown emergency. If the algorithms misread a reflection or mistake an echo for silence, one of those minivans could roll straight into a fire truck. For several tense minutes, the scene looks and sounds like a full blown crisis. Then, one by one, Waymo's Pacificas start to react, slowing, edging aside, signaling turns and yielding. As the convoy of sirens surges past, the engineers exhale. The cars did it. They responded like a careful human driver would. It won't make national headlines, but for Waymo, the day represents a victory. While its rivals chase speed in hopes of claiming market share early, Waymo is teaching machines to stay calm amid chaos and to keep people safe. Waymo isn't just a moonshot anymore. It has a CEO with a plan, John Krafczyk, an auto industry veteran who's previously worked at Hyundai and Ford. For two years he's been reshaping the company from a research lab into a business with customers, partners and finally, a promising path to revenue. Originally, Google considered licensing its tech to automakers and building its own cars, but kraftcheck is bringing focus. He views Waymo as a self driving technology company, not a car manufacturer, while licensing talks with manufacturers like Ford and Fiat Chrysler. Plod on Krafchick focuses the business on launching Waymo's own ride hailing network. The logic is simple. Control the vehicles, control the data control the experience. To make the point, Kraftchick strikes a deal guaranteed to sting Uber, a partnership with Lyft, its fiercest rival. The deal, announced in May 2017, will allow Waymo to test its self driving rides on Lyft's platform. The message is unmistakable. Waymo isn't waiting around anymore. It wants the same passengers Uber once assumed were its own. For the first time since Google co founder Larry Page's challenge a decade earlier, Waymo has both a product and a business model. A fleet of robo taxis that can earn money while they learn. It's February 2018, and after a year of accusations, counterclaims and damaging headlines, the case that once threatened to define Silicon Valley's self driving wars finally ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. Waymo settles with Uber out of court. The showdown that could have bankrupted reputations and reshaped the industry concludes with a handshake. By now, the main players in the dispute have fallen. Uber's hard charging CEO Travis Kalanick has been forced out after a string of scandals. And Anthony Lewandowski, the engineer at the heart of the lawsuit, has been fired. Accused of refusing to cooperate with the investigation. Under its new leadership, Uber wants peace. It agrees to give Waymo a 34% stake in Uber's business. It sounds small, but this stake is worth around $245 million. Uber also pledges not to use any of Waymo's software or hardware in its autonomous vehicle program. For Waymo, it's a vindication, if not quite an outright victory. The company that started in secrecy inside Google's labs has survived betrayal, lawsuits and well funded rivals. But as the lawyers pack up their boxes, the business race continues. And no one, not Waymo, Uber or Tesla, has yet won the race to build a driver that can truly replace humans. For Anthony Lewandowski, the story doesn't end there. He moved fast and mostly broke himself in the process. The man who once stood at the center of Silicon Valley's biggest race crashed out of it entirely. He lost his job, his reputation, and the fortune he'd hoped for. He sold his company to Uber in a deal worth up to $680 million. But the payout depended on hitting a series of long term technical milestones inside Uber's self driving program. None of those milestones were ever reached. And when Uber fired Levandowski for refusing to cooperate with its internal investigation, he lost the unvested stock tied to the deal. In the end, he walked away with almost nothing. And then came more trouble in 2020, federal prosecutors tried him for the theft of trade secrets from Alphabet. Lewandowski pleaded guilty. The judge called it the biggest trade secret crime he had ever seen. Lewandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but before he served a single day, he was pardoned by President Donald Trump. Today he has a new venture, Pronto AI, a startup focused on autonomous haulage systems. It's a warm spring evening in Tempe, Arizona in March 2018 and Uber is running trial robo taxis through the desert city. After nearly two years of testing, the company is still chasing Waymo's lead. Each self driving Uber has a human safety driver behind the wheel, ready to intervene if necessary. In one of the vehicles sits 44 year old safety driver Rafaela Vasquez. She's supposed to be keeping her eyes on the road. Instead, according to authorities, she's streaming the voice on her phone. Up ahead, Elaine Hertzberg, a 49 year old pedestrian, steps into the road. She's dressed in dark clothes but clearly visible in the glow of the street lights. And she's pushing a bicycle while she crosses mid block. The Uber car is traveling at 43 miles an hour and is just six seconds from impact. Inside the vehicle's computer, the sensors detect something in the road ahead. First they misclassify Hertzberg as an object, then as another vehicle, then as a bicycle. The software keeps changing its mind. A little over one second before impact, the system finally flags a collision warning and calculates that it needs to brake. But the car doesn't stop. At this point in time, Uber's self driving software doesn't have its own automatic emergency braking system enabled during autonomous mode. The company turned off that feature to avoid sudden stops and false positives. The system expects the human safety driver to handle emergency braking, but by the time Vasquez looks up, it's too late. The car strikes Hertzberg at full speed. She's taken to the hospital where she dies from her injuries. It's the first known case of a pedestrian killed by a self driving vehicle and the fallout for all involved will be massive. Foreign. It's the morning after Elaine Hertzberg was killed in Tempe by a self driving Uber vehicle, and Uber is pulling all of its self driving cars from the road. It also orders a top to bottom safety review. The Tempe police department discovers that safety driver Rafaela Vasquez was streaming video on her phone for around 42 minutes before the crash. Prosecutors later clear Uber of criminal responsibility, but Vasquez pleads guilty to endangerment and receives three years probation. Just five days later, there's another death. A Tesla Model X running on autopilot crashes on Highway 101 in Mountain View, California. Its driver, 38 year old Apple engineer Walter Huang, is killed. To the public, the message seems autonomous cars are not ready to be on the roads. Uber's self driving rollout stalls when its robo taxis finally return to the road in December 2018. They do so under heavy restrictions, lower speeds, shorter routes and two safety drivers in every car. For Waymo, the twin tragedies provide a grim validation of its own slow, methodical philosophy. Over the past decade, Waymo's vehicles have driven around more than 25 cities across six states, logging more than 5 million autonomous miles in the process without any fatal or life threatening crashes. For Waymo, safety isn't a slogan, it's the product.
- [19:08]
Narrator/Interviewer
Driving requires a lot from us all just to get around.
- [19:16]
David Brown
As Uber retreats from public roads, Waymo tiptoes into the market it's been promising to enter for a decade. In December 2018, its new Waymo One service begins operating in a small patch of suburban Phoenix.
- [19:31]
Narrator/Interviewer
What if the world's most experienced driver was at your fingertips, a fully self driving car ready to take you where you need to go?
- [19:40]
David Brown
The promise is seductive. Call a car with an app and a competent robot will show up whenever you need it to.
- [19:47]
Narrator/Interviewer
Introducing the self driving service Waymo1.
- [19:55]
David Brown
It's still an experiment. For now, the rides are limited to a few hundred early adopters who are all under strict non disclosure agreements and they can only travel within a 50 square mile geofence. Every turn has been mapped and rehearsed thousands of times and the cars move cautiously, never going above the speed limit. And yet, for the early adopters, it feels like science fiction come to life. After years of secrecy, setbacks and lawsuits, Waymo's driverless cars are finally carrying paying passengers on real streets. But as Waymo's fleet grows, so do its costs. Developing driverless cars isn't just complex, it's colossally expensive. Waymo's Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans are estimated to cost a minimum of $100,000 each. Once they are outfitted with the company's custom hardware, every vehicle is effectively a rolling supercomputer, bristling with sensors and spinning lasers. And even for its parent company, Alphabet, Google's owner, the spending is starting to sting. After more than a decade and billions poured into R and D, there's still no clear path to profit. Instead, there's an ever growing fleet of prototype taxis, plus the network of depots, engineers and remote support staff needed to keep them running. So in March 2020, Waymo does something unusual for a Google offshoot. It goes looking for outside money. The company launches an external investment round that pulls in more than $2 billion. Waymo insists the money isn't about survival, but scale. Yep, even Alphabet, the company that owns Google, finds the cost of driverless cars daunting. And there's no guarantee they'll ever pay for themselves. It's an expensive bet on a future that's still years from being widespread and even further from turning a profit. For a while, that didn't matter. Alphabet could afford to treat self driving cars as a science project with great pr. But the bills keep growing bigger. And for Uber, which doesn't have Google's search engine revenue throwing off tens of billions in cash each year, well, it's about to become all too much. After five turbulent years, billions in sunk costs, and one fatality, Uber finally hits the brakes on its autonomous vehicle ambitions. In December 2020, the company sells its self driving division to Aurora Innovation, a startup led by Chris Urmson, the industry veteran behind the Sandstorm Humvee and the man whose differences with Anthony Levandowski helped splinter Google's self driving team. Uber is done trying to build the future. It's going back to what it knows best, running a ride hailing and food delivery service. As Uber bows out, Waymo picks up speed in Phoenix. Its Waymo One service transitions from cautious pilot to a fully driverless, paid for taxi network. The cars ferry passengers across the metro area with no one behind the wheel. By early 2020, Waymo is already providing 1 to 2000 rides per week for paying customers in the Phoenix area, every one of them powered by the same invisible, tireless software brain. But a new competitor is now at the starting line, ready to gamble huge sums on the promise of a world that drives itself. It's December 2020 and Amazon is joining the race for a driverless future. Amazon full disclosure. Our parent company has just unveiled its latest acquisition. Zoox, a company with a robo vehicle that looks like a cross between a London cab and and a prop from Tron. Zoox's vehicle doesn't have a front or back. It can drive in either direction, spin in place, and even change course without ever reversing. It doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals either, just four seats that face each other. It's a robo taxi designed entirely for passengers. Because in Zoox's vision of the Future. There aren't any drivers. That future, though, is still a ways off. For now, Zoox remains in testing, years away from going public. But another rival is already pressing hard on Waymo's bumper cruise. The General Motors back Robo taxi division based in San Francisco Cruise isn't promising rides in some far off tomorrow. It's already on the streets today, battling Waymo block by block for control of the driverless city. It's 2am on a March night in 2023. The Mission District is quiet, its streets slick with night fog. After a frantic call, firefighters load a patient into an ambulance. The man is suffering a medical emergency. Emergency. He's not critical. But time still matters. As the crew prepares to pull away, a driverless Waymo vehicle noses into the street and stops directly in the ambulance's path. We got a driverless vehicle blocking the lane. A firefighter steps up to the vehicle, taps the door, then speaks into the external communication panel, the only way to reach a remote operator. Someone will come and move the vehicle, stand by. But seconds go by and nothing happens. Then, incredibly, a second Waymo rolls up and blocks the other side of the street. The ambulance is completely boxed in, its lights flashing uselessly against the white autonomous vehicles. Waymo later said it had no evidence that any of its vehicles blocked an ambulance that night. The fire department stood by its account with no footage to settle the dispute. The episode became another flashpoint in a growing debate about what happens when driverless cars meet real world emergencies. Several months later, the industry faces another embarrassment when a cruise prototype drives straight into a stretch of wet cement, its tires sinking as construction crews look on. Almost every company working on autonomous vehicle technology seems to be under scrutiny. Tesla's Autopilot system has also been the subject of several federal investigations, from a long running probe into crash patterns and driver over reliance to a Department of justice inquiry into the company's self driving claims. And then in October 2023, another genuine tragedy hits.
- [27:27]
Narrator/Interviewer
All right, we have an update now on that breaking news. In San Francisco, where a woman has been seriously injured after being hit by.
- [27:33]
David Brown
An autonomous vehicle, a cruise Robo taxi strikes a pedestrian who'd already been knocked into its path by another car, then drags her roughly 20ft before coming to a stop. Within a few weeks, California's DMV suspends Cruz's license. General Motors freezes its self driving car program nationwide. By spring 2024, frustration among some San Francisco residents is reaching boiling point. Robo taxis are clogging intersections, stalling at lights and blocking bus lanes. To some, they're just the latest symbol of tech companies testing their toys on everyone else. It's a Lunar New Year celebration in San Francisco's Chinatown. Amid drums and firecrackers, a Waymo rolls into a crowded street after dropping off a passenger. The crowd parts, then closes around it. Light that on fire. A bottle smashes against the hood. Someone punches out a window. A firework arcs through the shattered glass and explodes. The Waymo goes up in flames, its sensors melting as hundreds of phones film the scene. The driverless revolution that once promised calmer, safer streets now seems to be making people angry. And yet, despite all the headlines about crashes and software errors, most rides in autonomous vehicles go exactly as planned. In fact, the data is unequivocal. Autonomous cars are safer than human driven vehicles by a wide margin. Worldwide, around 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents every year. In the U.S. 94% of crashes involve human error. And two out of three Americans will be affected by a drunk driving accident during their lifetime. And Waymo's Data from the four cities it operates in shows you're 85% less likely to get into an injury causing crash in one of their cars compared to one driven by a human. But poll after poll shows that most people simply don't trust driverless cars. In 2024, AAA, the American Automobile association surveyed more than 1,000American adults. 66% said they were afraid to ride in a fully self driving vehicle. A 2021 Pew Research center poll found similar skepticism, with most Americans doubting the technology's safety and only a minority willing to ride in a fully autonomous vehicle. The problem is that safer than a human isn't the same as safe. The cars continue to make mistakes. Sudden stops, indecisive turns, moments where a traffic cone or a plastic bag confuses a multi million dollar computer. Errors that only reinforce people's fears. Right now, the financial impact of that fear is limited. Waymo and its rivals aren't expecting to turn a profit yet, and autonomous vehicles are on the roads in only a handful of cities. But widespread adoption will require convincing people to get over their fear. Driverless vehicles face another geography. Waymo's success stories come mostly from cities built for cars like Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles, where the roads are wide, intersections are predictable, and the weather is accommodating. Drop those same vehicles into older, denser cities like Boston, Tokyo or London, and every curb cyclist and crosswalk becomes a new challenge, a new point of potential failure. And as driverless cars become more visible, the scrutiny intensifies. Every Malfunction becomes a headline, every error a viral clip. The question that once sounded futuristic now feels uncomfortably current. If machines drive better than most of us, why do we still find it so hard to trust them? It's May 2024, and just when it seems like Waymo has weathered the worst of the backlash against its vehicles, another blow lands. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announces a formal investigation into the company's driverless fleet. The NHTSA is the US Federal government's top road safety watchdog. As part of the Department of Transportation, its job is to keep Americans safe on the roads. Its work includes setting safety standards for carmaker, investigating crashes, and recalling vehicles with dangerous defects. The regulators say they've received 22 reports of unexpected driving behavior from Waymo's vehicles, including some incidents that involve collisions with clearly visible objects that a human driver would be expected to avoid. And Waymo isn't the only company under federal investigation. In the space of a Single week in April 2024, two Zoox equipped Toyota Highlanders, one near Las Vegas, one in San Francisco, braked abruptly after misperceiving obstacles, leaving the motorcyclists behind them. No time to react. Both riders were injured. The near identical crashes just four days apart, combined with Waymo's issues, prompts regulators to pore over both companies and their respective technologies. Waymo has long sold itself as the grown up in the robo taxi race, the antidote to Uber's recklessness in Tesla's bravado. But now its brand identity is at stake. The NHTSA estimates its investigation will Involve more than 400 Waymo operated vehicles and will evaluate whether its automated driving systems may present an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety. The announcement sends a shiver through Silicon Valley. Waymo's brand, painstakingly built over 15 years and backed by billions of dollars, rests on one promise that its cars are safer than we are. If that promise fails, the company that set out to build a driver might find itself driven off the road. In July 2025, after more than a year of uncertainty, the industry finally received some clarity. The NHTSA ends its 14 month investigation into Waymo after reviewing 22 reports of potential traffic law violations, including collisions with cones and gates. The regulator closes its investigation following Waymo's agreement to issue recalls and software updates to address the identified risks. The NHTSA says the changes mitigate their safety concerns. Though it will continue monitoring Waymo's fleet. For Waymo, it's a kind of vindication. Its fleet has logged almost 100 million autonomous miles, enough to drive to the moon and back 200 times. The company now delivers around 450,000 paid rides each week. It's also bringing its service to new cities, sometimes with help from its former foe, Uber in Atlanta. Uber customers can now hail a Waymo directly through the ride hailing app. And while skepticism and fear about driverless taxis still exists, the more widespread these rides become, the more likely it seems that people will come around to their benefits.
- [35:59]
Dr. Srinivas Pita
If you go back to the first people who were flying on airplanes, that would be the same level of, I would say, anxiety and skepticism as well.
- [36:09]
Narrator/Interviewer
Dr. Srinivas Pita leads Georgia Tech's autonomous and connected transportation lab and is watching the rollout.
- [36:15]
Dr. Srinivas Pita
As people get more and more used to it and see that these systems are doing the driving in a way that you know you would expect to be safe, then I think over time, people will start becoming more comfortable.
- [36:29]
David Brown
In August 2025, Zoox clears its own regulatory hurdle. The NHTSA approves the company's distinctive pod shaped vehicle for on road use after confirming it meets all federal safety standards, even without a steering wheel or pedals. In Las Vegas, Zoox begins offering short rides on fixed routes, its futuristic bi directional cars finally carrying real passengers. Passengers under the desert sun, the robo taxi dream seems back on track. Some competitors may have fallen by the wayside, but two rival visions remain. Waymo's cautious expansion and Zoox's radical design. But this road trip is still in the early stages, the equivalent of the era when horses and carts dominate. Even though the first cars were already for sale, accidents like the Waymo car that ran over a cat in San Francisco's Mission District still do make headlines. And driverless vehicles still have a lot to prove. That's why the battlegrounds in this business war are shifting again. The sun baked avenues of Phoenix and Austin are no longer enough. Waymo has been testing its vehicles in New York City, arguably the ultimate test of urban driving. That's a place where taxis weave, cyclists dart, and delivery trucks frequently double park. It's a long way from the straight highways of Arizona or the wide boulevards of Los Angeles. If Waymo can make it there, he can make it anywhere. But one wrong move in Manhattan's stop and go traffic could well undo 15 years of progress. It's been 21 years since the DARPA Grand Challenge sent a pack of robotic vehicles into the Mojave Desert, and not a single one reached the finish line. Today, robo taxis operate in several US cities, and their footprint is expanding. In November 2025, Waymo announced its driverless vehicles will start carrying passengers on freeways, with plans to expand into Washington, D.C. and London in 2026. With spinning sensor domes and headlights blinking in coded patterns, the vehicles still do look faintly alien. But it seems they're here to stay. Passengers climb in, tap a screen, and roll off with no one behind the wheel. Amazon's Zoox now shuttles passengers around Las Vegas. The federal probe into its braking issue was closed after the company improved its systems. And now it plans to expand into cities like Miami and Austin, pending NHTSA approval of its unusual design for wider use. Other contenders are joining the race, too. Tesla is testing robo taxi technology in Texas while continuing to deploy its full self driving software to consumer vehicles elsewhere. Volkswagen is developing its own Robotaxi fleet for Europe's roads. And in China, tech giant Baidu's Apollo Go service is already operating at a far greater scale than anything in the US Logging hundreds of thousands of rides a week across cities like Wuhan, Beijing and Shenzhen. And for investors, the stakes in this race are staggering. A 2019 McKinsey report predicts global revenues from autonomous taxis could reach as high as $1.6 trillion by 2030. If that number holds, Alphabet's $11 billion plus bet on Waymo might one day look like a bargain. Funny thing, though. Entrepreneurs and investors often hear big market projections and assume their slice of the future is there for the taking. But you know, markets don't unfold like spreadsheets. They behave more like weather. Predictable only to a point, sometimes fickle. And often you wish you brought a bigger coat or an umbrella. The winners aren't always the ones who bet on the biggest numbers. They tend to be the ones who stay flexible when the outlook suddenly turns nasty. You know, if there's anything we keep learning here on business wars, it might be this. As much as it matters to have a good plan going in, there's something that matters even more. Adaptability. And in this space in particular, there's a whole lot in flux at the moment. Sure, the robo taxis may be here, but profits, reliability and public trust remain in transit. For all the billions spent and promised and the millions of miles driven, the toughest part of the journey still lies ahead. From Wondery, this is episode two of Waymo and the rise of the robo taxis for business wars. A quick note about the recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said. These scenes are dramatizations, but they're based on research. We've used many sources for this season too, including Autonomy by Lawrence Burns and driven by Alex Davies. I'm your host, David Brown. Our story was written by Simon Parkin with research by David Wolinski. Sound design by Kyle Randall. Fact checking by Gabrielle Drollett. Our producer is Tristan Donovan of Yellowant. Our managing producer is Desi Blalock. Our senior producers are Jenny Bloom and Emily Frost. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer, Beckman and Marshall Louie. For wondering.