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What Dmitri Dolgov thinks about self-driving cars

@dmitri-dolgov · 22 positions · 0 changes of mind

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

Dmitri Dolgov did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

10 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Dmitri Dolgov has said — not written or endorsed by them.

  1. Our readingA working demo is at best one per cent of the work; the nines that follow it are where the real work is.

    Their wordsAnd a working demo is 1% at best of the work that you have to do. The many nines of performance, the many nines of reliability that follow, that's where the real work happens.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 5th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  3. Our readingWaymo's demo took eighteen months and the product took fifteen years — the gap between the two is the whole job.

    Their wordsIt took us about 10 more years to begin providing a service, and then 5 more years to scale to half a million trips per week. So, the demo took 18 months, the product took about 15 years.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 6th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  5. Our readingReliability lives on an exponential ladder of nines: every additional nine costs about ten times the effort of the one before.

    Their wordsreliability and performance lives on this exponential ladder of nines. So, getting to that first 90% or 99%, that's the easy part. But then every next nine that you want to add, that takes about 10 times more effort.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 7th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  7. Our readingAt scale the long tail stops being an edge case and becomes the entire problem statement.

    Their wordsAnd at scale, the long tail is the problem space, is your entire problem statement. When you drive millions of miles per week, a rare event that might happen once in a million miles, that just becomes your daily reality.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 8th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  9. Our readingThe common failure is picking the technology with the fastest early ramp and extrapolating it, when that curve plateaus below what the product needs.

    Their wordscommon failure mode is picking the tech that gives you the fastest early ramp, riding that steep curve, feeling like you're winning, projecting that, you know, steep slope into the future and feeling like the sky is the limit, and then hitting the plateau, and discovering that the technology path that you picked actually flattens out way before the performance that is required by your product.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 10th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  11. Our readingCameras alone are enough to approximately match a human driver, but weak sensing puts safety on a curve that flattens out well below superhuman.

    Their wordsHowever, if you are targeting full autonomy, and you're targeting superhuman, strongly superhuman performance, you find that weak sensing just leads to a safety curve that flattens out way too early.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 11th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  13. Our readingDriving turns out to be much like language modelling, because a driver is holding a conversation with other road users in the body language of a car.

    Their wordsTurns out, the task of driving is not that dissimilar from the task of modeling language uh because of the social aspects of driving. You're kind of having a conversation with other dynamic actors in the world, but you're doing that in the space kind of body language of your agent, your car, as opposed to just the language of words.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 13th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  15. Our readingPlain end-to-end learning is not enough for a safety-critical agent that has to be superhuman, however fast it gets you started.

    Their wordsBut if you need to reach superhuman levels of performance in a fully autonomous agent in a safety-critical environment, uh, just doing kind of that basic vanilla end-to-end is not enough.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 15th of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  17. Our readingModels leak and algorithms get copied, but hundreds of millions of audited autonomous miles cannot be replicated — earned trust is the real moat.

    Their wordsYour your models can be leaked, algorithms can be replicated, but hundreds of millions of miles of fully autonomous operations in the real world, backed by evidence-grade evaluation and publicly audited proof, that is much, much more difficult to replicate.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 21st of 22 in this recording

    Interesting

  19. Our readingIn the areas where it operates, the Waymo driver is about seventeen times better than human drivers at avoiding crashes that cause serious injury.

    Their wordsin the areas where we operate, the Waymo driver is about 17 times better than human drivers when it comes to crashes uh that cause serious injury.

    ↗Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Workyoutube.com 22nd of 22 in this recording

    Interesting