Andrea Vaccaro, the man who drives self-driving cars
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Welcome to Phoenix, the first city in the world where you arrive at the airport, download an app, call a self-driving driver and reach your destination without any human behind the wheel. To throw the the world’s first self-driving taxi service already in 2019 is Waymo, a company of the Alphabet group (Google), which has already had the green light also for San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin. But the news is that the head of vehicle safety on the road is an Italian engineer. Andrea Vaccaro, just turned 40, 10 years abroad. He has worked on self-driving subway systems in Milan and Honolulu. Then he moved to Hyperloop in Los Angeles and for four years he has been at Waymo, the largest self-driving company in the world. He leads a 24/7 team that monitors the vehicles to make sure everything is going as planned. The car is an electric Jaguar. Outside sensors with laser beams, 20 cameras that see over 500 meters, radars that measure the speed of things around us. Inside a driving computer, a steering wheel that moves by itself, and a display that shows you the route.
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Waymo was born in 2009 within Google, but since 2017 it is a separate entity. It is the largest company in the world in this sector. Its competitor in active service is General Motors’ Cruise. “We do not sell autonomous cars to the public but we offer a transportation as a service, such as a taxi or Uber. We have also been testing a fleet of trucks for the long-distance transport of goods for years”. The advantages? The safety, first of all. “The Waymo driver drives better than a human being. He doesn’t drive drunk. He has quicker reflexes. In addition to safety, you have the same type of car at your disposal, always clean, driving is soft. Live a unique experience”.
Genoese, electronic engineer, two children, an important book that immediately brings him closer to technology. AND The road that leads you to tomorrow by Bill Gates read at age 12. The first trip to the USA at 14 years old. “Already at the New York airport I had decided: I have to go back here”. In 2005, he is one of 11 guys selected for the first Silicon Valley Tour, with Paolo Marenco. She is 20 years old. “A beautiful experience that marked my life”. Two years later, for her master’s degree thesis, she used the contacts from that trip to find an internship. You try Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, many other SV companies. “The answer was always no. Then a fluke.”Alexander Rattinow Director of the Electronics Engineering Division at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, invites me to do a thesis on control systems for particle accelerators at the University of Berkeley. I was supposed to stay 3 months, I stayed 9. And I was paid too, a dream”.
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He returns to Genoa, graduates and immediately returns to Berkeley. We have 2 years left, but two things bring him back to Italy: a girlfriend, now his wife, and a job offer from Ansaldo of Genoa which offers him an incredible position, to work on the autonomous driving systems of the trains of the Milanese subways. It’s 2010. Vaccaro starts working in Milan and soon realizes he’s there an opportunity in Honolulu, in Hawaii where Ansaldo is about to build the self-driving subway. “I told my boss: if you’re looking for someone to send there, I’m here. The answer was: go!”. He leaves first alone, then returns, marries his fiancée and leaves again. And once in Honolulu, another stroke of luck. “My boss, technical manager of the project, has to return to Italy. They offered me his role. We stayed in Hawaii for 4 years. Splendid place. A paradise on earth. House on the beach. Treated very well. Of course it wasn’t free. We we made an incredible deck also because of the 12-hour time zone with Italy. Which means that you already have meetings at 6 in the morning and you’re still there at 9 in the evening. After 4 years, however, you are fed up with living on an island”.
Vaccaro looks for new opportunities. He tries to get into Google in Silicon Valley, he can’t. One day on Forbes he reads the news of hyperloops, Elon Musk’s idea of a supersonic train. The company that is making it is Hyperloop One. “I go to the site, I read the paper, cutting-edge technology. They had just been born, 5 employees, I find the email of the founder Brogan BamBrogan, an incredible character, and I try to sell myself – “I am the person you need, because I I work in technology, I am a transport expert. I can bring you a new perspective”
Six days later, at 6 on a Saturday morning, he receives an email. Brogan invites him to Los Angeles on Monday. In less than 24 hours, Vaccaro leaves. Arrived in the city, he discovers that the office is in an absurd, hallucinatory area, to be feared. Andrea wants to risk leaving a dream place for an innovative startup. After another 7 days, the proposal arrives. However, he realizes that he does not have a visa for the USA. His visa in Honolulu was linked to Ansaldo. He tries various attempts. Nothing. So he gives up his job and resumes his life in Honolulu. Six months later, another stroke of luck. The wife wins the Green Card in the lottery. They had been taking the ticket for six years. They had a 0.1% chance of winning it. Reappears from Hyperloop, hired. He becomes Safety Director. “We built the 500-meter prototype with the capsule inside, in the Nevada desert. It was fantastic, but we worked 15-hour days, I traveled a lot. In 2018 I became a father and it was no longer sustainable to work like this. I received proposals from hunters Silicon Vally heads, I was looking around I chose Waymo, which impressed me with the talents working there. I have been here since 2018 and entered as a simple engineer”.
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“Mine is not the story of a genius. I’m not a particularly intelligent person, I didn’t come out with 110 summa cum laude in college. In life, however, I wanted to do something. I put myself on the right path to be able to do these things. I persevered and went looking for my fortunes. To return to San Francisco I tried a thousand ways. I went through a thousand interviews to move from Hawaii to Los Angeles.
“My parents were born in a small town on the Amalfi coast and in the late 70s they moved to Genoa and opened two restaurants. They gave me the opportunity to do what I wanted in life, as long as I did something. If I didn’t have wanted to study, my place was already there, guaranteed, at the restaurant”.
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Huge technical preparation, a lot of humility. “I’ve always been willing to join the companies I wanted to conquer.” Developing technology is his passion. “I love working on something that tangibly changes how people live.” He has been a US citizen for a year. “But here I never felt like a foreigner even though my English wasn’t perfect.” The thought of returning to Italy is always there in the mind. “Living far away is tiring especially when you have young children and you don’t have your parents close by. They are getting old and you are preventing them from spending time with their grandchildren”.
For her children, she has a dream: “That they don’t need to get driving licenses.”
Before hanging up on him, he tells me about another important book in his life. “AND Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel, the cyberpunk tale of a dystopian future where people live attached to computers. The book from which the film Blade Runner took its inspiration.
“I’ve seen things you humans couldn’t imagine… do you remember?
By the way: when will we see them too? “We will arrive with Waymo driver in Rome and Milan, but it will still take a few years”.
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