John Krafcik, CEO of Google's Self-Driving Car Project
Sam Smith: One of my co-workers pointed out that a Caterham owner working on Google's koala car is like a master chef becoming head of Soylent. Why did you want this job?
John Krafcik: [Laughs.] Many, many reasons. I've always fought for great safety technology. What was great about Google was that opportunity to have a big impact. You know the data? 1.25 million people die on roadways every year. It's pretty amazing that we, as a global society, aren't more pissed off about that. We should be really angry. And we would be really angry if we could see one 737 crashing every hour.
SS: More than 33,000 people a year in America. Cars are generally safer than they once were, but that number's still huge. How did we get used to it?
JK: That is the question. How have we come to accept that as an appropriate tax on transportation? I think part of it is because only four to five percent of the time those fatalities are the fault of the machine. The rest, it's human error. It's really tough. Technology can help us solve that. I felt excited about the opportunity to help. Recognizing that it was in no way going to impede us as car enthusiasts, our ability to drive the cars we want to drive, on the roads we want to drive on.
SS: Why a Caterham and a 911? You once said that you'd never get rid of either.
JK: I love those two cars for completely different reasons. The 911 is the perfect manifestation of an initial idea that was sort of okay but not brilliant. But through 50 years of refinement, Japanese kaizen, you make this awesome machine. The Caterham is the opposite of that, right? Colin Chapman sort of put the Lotus Seven down, almost perfect from the start. And it received no kaizen, very little care, throughout its life cycle. It too is now over 50 years old. And it too is just an awesome car. It came out nearly perfect.
SS: I sometimes wonder how much longer we have with stuff like this. Every few years, somebody writes that this golden age of automobiles is about to end. Then Dodge spits out a Hellcat, or the Bugatti Chiron happens. How long before that tide goes back out?
JK: I don't think it can.
SS: Really?
JK: Yeah. We have amazing capability to adapt and innovate, and maybe the center of gravity moves from internal combustion to electric or even hydrogen fuel cell. Who knows? I think we'll always have cars that are a blast to drive. What will go away is the drudgery. It's not the Pacific Coast Highway on a sunny Sunday morning. That's part of the myth that we create, both in my old world and in your current world. It doesn't really reflect most people's experiences.
SS: People far more educated than I am believe that it's eventually going to become harder to drive yourself. Whether through taxation or costly insurance policies, it's just going to be deeply discouraged.
JK: I think it's super far off. We humans travel, in the U.S., this pretty amazing number—3.2 trillion miles per year. About 10 trillion globally. I think there will remain human-driven miles for many, many years. So I don't think that's anything we'll see.