Waymo‘s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana has called for federal regulators to establish a national standard requiring autonomous vehicle developers to demonstrate their safety, as competing Robotaxi approaches emerge across the US.
Mawakana’s comments come as Washington moves to clear the regulatory runway for the broader industry, with a bipartisan bill set to establish national safety standards for autonomous vehicles.
Questioned by The New York Times about competing robotaxi services — such as Tesla‘s and Zoox‘s — the lawyer argued that shared roads demand shared accountability and consistent oversight to build public trust in the industry.
“This is, to me, where the government has a role to play,” she told the media outlet in an interview published on Sunday. “I think the regulators should issue a national standard, so everyone is demonstrating their safety.”
According to Mawakana, these companies are not only looking to build trust in their services but in a “new product category,” as robotaxi services are only now becoming available worldwide.
“We share the roads, but we’ve really built the Waymo driver to operate on the roads as they exist today,” she added. “We don’t want anything to happen that undermines the trust that we’re working so hard to build.”
Tesla’s Transparency
Waymo‘s current and past executives have been critical of Tesla‘s vision-based approach to self-driving — which rejects LiDAR — and its lack of transparency.
Late last year, Mawakana questioned whether some autonomous vehicle developers are doing what is necessary to “earn the right to make the roads safer.”
The comments were seen as an indirect aim at Tesla by stating that some firms were “not telling us what’s happening with their fleets.”
Early this year, ex-CEO of Google’s Waymo and a current Rivian Board Member John Krafcik said that Tesla and Elon Musk have been deceiving customers for over a decade, stating that “there should be some accountability for that.”
Safest Path
About a year ago, Waymo’s co-CEO told CNBC that she sees LiDAR as a crucial safety feature, stating that its integration has been proving “the safest path to doing this. For us, there’s no reason to eliminate aspects that make it safe.”
Questioned if she thinks Tesla “is focusing on cost and then safety,” Makawana said that “it’s less of a focus on them and more of a focus on what we’ve learned.”
On Sunday’s interview, Mawakana drew a distinction between “the letter of the law” and “the custom of a place” when asked how Waymo handles traffic rules that human drivers routinely bend to keep traffic flowing.
“Some of those customs are what the Waymo driver learns over time,” she noted, adding that “technically, that’s not what you’re supposed to do, but the technology understands that that’s exactly what you have to do in order to not block traffic.”
Tesla x Waymo
After the interview was shared on X by Tesla enthusiast ‘niccruzpatane,’ Tesla AI Staff Engineer Yun-Ta Tsai criticized Waymo by saying the company cannot “even make their own cars.”
“They can’t even make their own cars and outsource to 3rd parties,” he wrote. “We make all the autonomous vehicles in 🇺🇸.”
While Waymo uses modified Jaguar I-PACE SUVs, both Tesla and the Amazon subsidiary Zoox have developed their own model, purpose-built for the service.
Tesla is set to begin production of its Cybercab model in April, planning for 2 million units built annually after an initially slower ramp.
When questioned whether the latest version of FSD being tested internally was “safer than Waymo,” Tsai wrote that “Tesla do[es]n’t need remote human checks when autonomous vehicles are near school buses.”
The engineer was referring to a probe opened by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) earlier this year on Waymo, where the agency said it would “examine the interaction between Waymo vehicles and school buses stopped for loading and unloading students.”
“It has nothing to do with LiDAR. It has to do with the brain,” Tsai added in the X reply.
Tesla is facing its own NHTSA probes regarding the Full Self-Driving software, an unsupervised version of which is already being used for its Robotaxi service.
Zoox
Alphabet’s Waymo remains the US robotaxi segment leader, surpassing 400,000 weekly rides across six metro areas in February.
The company now operates commercially in 10 cities, with London and Tokyo in its sights for 2026.
Both Tesla and Zoox are accelerating to catch up.
Zoox‘s testing fleet spans San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington DC, and the Amazon subsidiary recently expanded into Phoenix and Dallas.
Last week, the Amazon subsidiary announced it had struck a deal with Uber to make its vehicles available through the app in Las Vegas this summer.
