Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana stunned attendees at TechCrunch Disrupt by saying aloud what many critics fear: a robotaxi fatality isn’t hypothetical, it’s inevitable.
Her comment that the company plans for “when,” not “whether,” a Waymo vehicle will eventually kill someone immediately reignited backlash against self-driving tech, especially from people who already distrust how aggressively these cars were rolled out on public streets.
While it’s true that human-driven cars cause tens of thousands of deaths every year, the admission struck many as callous and out of touch.
Waymo co-CEO says first robotaxi death is inevitable
Mawakana admitted that her company is bracing for the first robotaxi fatality, because oh baby, it’s coming.
“We really worry as a company about those days,” she said in response to a question on how society will respond to a Waymo kill. “You know, we don’t say ‘whether.’ We say ‘when.’ And we plan for them.”
She assured the audience that she believes the public will accept it when it happens.
“I think the challenge for us is making sure that society has a high enough bar on safety that companies are held to.”
To be fair, cars with drivers cause many thousands of deaths each year. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there were 42,514 fatalities of this nature in the U.S. in 2022 alone.
According to Waymo’s own data released in September 2025, its driverless vehicles are 91 percent safer than those with humans behind the wheel.
“Compared to human drivers over 96 million rider-only miles, the Waymo Driver has been involved in 11x fewer serious injury crashes, 5x fewer crashes with airbag deployment, and 5x fewer injury-causing crashes,” a Waymo spokesperson wrote in an email to the Daily Dot.
Of course, they have every incentive to cook those numbers. Complaints of Waymo cars running red lights and engaging in other unsafe actions have gone viral over the past year.
This data also cannot account for deaths that could occur from their habit of blocking emergency vehicles.
“Waymo pulling a Vanessa Hudgens”
Distrust in self-driving cars and frustration with the fact that this technology was pushed onto the public without our consent primed folks to respond to this with anti-bot vitriol. Regardless, there’s simply no way to say “our product will kill people” that won’t result in backlash.
On X, user @leojupiter333 asked readers to “imagine being so clearly evil and only caring about money to such an extent that you admit that innocent people will die because of your product and yet you still enthusiastically roll out that product anyways.”
“Waymo pulling a Vanessa Hudgens,” joked @watch_max_tweet.
Still, some did acknowledge the fact that vehicle fatalities are, in fact, something we accept as a society.
“I’m lightly skeptical of AI, but I find the outrage against this highly irrational,” said @toxoplasmobro.
“We tolerate tens of thousands of vehicle fatalities a year with every single one of them caused by human drivers up until a few years ago.”
At the same time, others pointed out that public transportation is also much less likely to kill people and includes the added benefits of reducing emissions and traffic congestion while also costing much less than any Waymo ride.
Commenter @ladescarada6 wrote that “all this when we can fund better transit and transportation networks overall pisses me OFF.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Waymo for comment via email.
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