Google self-driving car project spun out as business called Waymo
Google’s self-driving car is ready to take the wheel.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said Tuesday that its autonomous vehicle project is spinning off from its research lab X and will operate as a standalone company under the name Waymo.
Alphabet’s decision to spin out Waymo is a signal that the company thinks its selfdriving technology has advanced beyond research project status and is ready for commercialization.
Autonomous vehicles are a hotly contested field of technology, pursued by other tech giants, promising upstarts and traditional automakers, who all see the potential of selfdriving cars to upend the automobile industry.
Advancements in sensor technology coupled with breakthroughs in machine learning — the ability of computers to learn from vast amounts of data and improve over time — mean driverless cars (essentially supercomputers on wheels) could become a regular sight on the roads over the next few years.
“As we look at this space and the opportunities ahead of us, we see so much,” said John Krafcik, chief executive of Waymo. “We’re a new company, but we’ve been at this for a while.”
Waymo joins the roster of Alphabet comnewest panies, which includes Google. Krafcik said the new arrangement allows Waymo to tap into the infrastructure and resources of Alphabet with the feel of an independent venture-backed company. He said Waymo’s technology could have uses as varied as ridesharing services and long-haul trucking.
Alphabet was an early technological leader in the field, but its efforts to establish a business around the technology have fallen short. Since 2009, Alphabet’s self-driving cars have logged 3.7 million driverless kilometres — the equivalent of more than 400 round-trip drives from New York to Los Angeles — on test drives in California, Arizona, Texas and Washington state.
Waymo said it completed the world’s first fully driverless ride on public roads last year in Austin, Texas, when passenger Steve Mahan, who is blind, rode in a car without a steering wheel or pedals.
Safely ensconced in Google’s so-called moon shot factory, the self-driving car project did not face the type of financial pressure to commercialize its technology that a startup or a company without Google’s resources would have. Despite its head start, other companies have incorporated autonomous driving technology into their products and services more quickly.
Tesla Motors has a semi-autonomous feature called that can take over for the driver for long stretches, and it is preparing for its cars to go fully autonomous as early as next year. Tesla also announced its intention to start a ride-hailing service once its driverless car technology is ready.
The ride-hailing service Uber is already testing self-driving cars to pick up customers in Pittsburgh with a person on standby in the driver’s seat.
At the same time, the list of companies with an eye on the space is growing. Apple has hundreds of employees working on autonomous car technology, and carmakers are snapping up tech talent. General Motors acquired the self-driving car startup Cruise Automation this year, and Ford is expanding aggressively in Silicon Valley with a research and development centre.
For Google, the goal was to design a vehicle that is responsible for 100 per cent of the driving. Google said this approach was more difficult and would take more time. However, Google said it was ultimately safer than semi-autonomous vehicles, which may require a driver to take back control of the car without awareness of the surroundings.
In August 2015, Google brought in Krafcik, a former Hyundai Motor executive, to lead the project and bring it closer to commercialization. It has also lost crucial personnel on the project, sometimes to competitors.