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A taxi pulls up with no one in the front seat. Would you get in? We invited Waymo director Nick Pelly to take us from that first uncanny moment to the engineering that makes a driverless ride feel calm, confident and, by the data, far safer than most humans behind the wheel.

We walk through the full autonomy stack in plain English: how cameras, radar and LiDAR fuse into a single view of the world; how perception, prediction and planning work together to thread through double‑parked vans, nudge through gridlock and still behave like a good road citizen. Nick explains why Level 4 autonomy is about design domain as much as capability, why hardware still matters, and how redundancy handles blocked sensors, grime or failures without drama. We dig into machine learning at scale, from training on diverse city data to tens of billions of simulated miles, and how teams tune precision and recall so the car avoids both missed hazards and needless hard braking.

Beyond the ride, we zoom out to the business and the city. Phoenix offered a launchpad to build the marketplace, charging and fleet operations; San Francisco demanded handling a busy city and human‑like judgement; London beckons with dense streets and weather. We explore what happens as adoption grows: fewer parking lots, smoother traffic, motorway platoons, even intersections that need fewer lights when vehicles coordinate. Nick also shares his focus area—reliability and freeway fail‑safes—designing for worst‑case scenarios so the system exits danger gracefully at speed; this episode was recorded a week before Nick and the team announced highway driving!

If you’re curious about autonomous vehicles, safety, AI, urban mobility or just want to know what “robotaxi” really means, this conversation turns buzzwords into something you can picture—and maybe soon, ride. Enjoy the episode, then follow and share the show, and leave a quick review to help us bring you an even bigger season two.

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