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John Krafcik

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John Krafcik is a seasoned automotive executive who recently joined Rivian's Board of Directors in July 2023.12 Here are some key details about his background and experience:

Career Highlights

  • Waymo: Served as CEO from 2015 to 2021, leading the company's efforts in autonomous driving technology.13
  • TrueCar: Held roles as President and Board Member.3
  • Hyundai Motor America: Served as President and CEO from 2008 to 2013.4
  • Ford Motor Company: Worked in various product development roles from 1990 to 2004.4
  • NUMMI: Started his automotive career as a quality and manufacturing engineer at this GM-Toyota joint venture.2

Education and Contributions

  • Studied Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management.1
  • Introduced the term "lean production" as a researcher in MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program.23

Current Roles

  • Board of Directors at Rivian (since July 2023).4
  • Member of Rivian's audit committee.2
  • Serves on the Supervisory Boards of Daimler Truck AG and Daimler Truck Holding AG.12

Expertise

Krafcik brings over 35 years of experience in the automotive industry, with particular expertise in:

  • Manufacturing engineering
  • Automotive technology
  • Leadership in innovative companies
  • Electric vehicle development

His appointment to Rivian's board is seen as valuable for helping the company achieve its mission of electrifying transportation and making it more sustainable.13

Highlights

Aug 5 · linkedin

Anyone else feeling it's a bit like the 2010s lately in the AV space? Demo videos, "intervention-free" "autonomous" rides with safety drivers, and one company's evergreen promise of unsupervised autonomous driving, with dozens of supervised YT videos that seek to back that up. We've seen this all before, haven't we?

The simple truth is low sample size demonstrations like these don't predict ultra-high-volume safety and reliability.

This point was brought home nicely a few years ago in this 2020 blog post that highlighted ten super-challenging 100-mile intervention-free drives the Google Self-Driving Car project completed about 15 years ago, in 2009-2010:

"One lesson from these early experiences is clear — demonstration videos are fun to create, and perhaps even more fun to watch, but the real challenge in creating the world’s most experienced driver™ is scaling robustly to hundreds, thousands, and millions of safely delivered rides."

One good busy-city ride, five awesome demos, heck even ten perfect hundred-mile rides? That's all great, but they're all still just small steps on the long journey to deploying a safe, reliable AV system on public roads.

Jul 20 · linkedin

It's interesting that the very best reporting on the global L4 AV space comes from Germany. Journalists like Jonas Rest have been covering the space for years, take their roles seriously, and are unafraid to be brutally honest & objective, e.g., assessing Waymo as the clear leader, and calling out the glaring failures & broken promises of the ne'er-do-wells and hype-y newcomers.

Tech/AV journalists, policymakers & AV space observers: put manager magazin on your lidar

Related Questions

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John Krafcik
John Krafcik, photo 1
John Krafcik, photo 2
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Location

Santa Monica, California, United States