Reliability on the road
On a fine Monday morning, you hop in the car, crawl through traffic, yield to jaywalking pedestrians, and finally reach the office. Now imagine spending that whole commute preparing for a big presentation instead. That’s the future Mike Curtiss is building at Waymo – a world where driving is outsourced to computers.
Getting a driver’s license is a milestone of adulthood. You learn road signs, rules, and how to anticipate unpredictable drivers. Even then, road injury stats are far from reassuring. So how does a computer earn its license – and do better?
Software reliability and quality directly impact road safety. Not just for the people inside a self-driving car, but for everyone around it. At Waymo, the bar is high.
In his BugBash talk, Mike shared how Waymo builds that level of trust. The usual problems, gaps between test and production environment, hard-to-hit edge cases, still apply, but at Waymo’s scale, they’re amplified. The answer? Shift left, fix fast, simulate constantly. That’s how their software earned its license.
