Google comes clean on driverless car plan

Google has formally launched its long-rumoured autonomous vehicle project, which will be delivered by a new sister company called Waymo under the ownership of the search engine giant's parent company Alphabet.

It will be led by former Ford and Hyundai executive John Krafcik, who yesterday outlined Google's new self-driving program, which now has an official website.

Krafcik said at a press event in San Francisco yesterday that Waymo, which will operate like a “venture-backed startup" based in Mountain View, California, will be develop self-driving technology and commercialise opportunities in trucking, logistics and partnerships with car-makers.

The first of these has already been announced, and Krafcik confirmed his company is in now in the “build phase” of its partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to develop 100 autonomous Chrysler Pacifica people-movers with a raft of advanced sensors.

“We are a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people to move around,” Krafcik said, adding that that Waymo – which stands for 'A new way forward in mobility' -- is not a car company.

Previously operating as a part of the secretive research unit Google X, the project's first driverless undertaking on public roads (without a steering wheel or brake pedal) took place in Austin, Texas, in October 2015, and since then it has completed 10,000 similar tests.

Waymo says it has been working towards "a future without the tired, drunk or distracted driving that contributes to 1.2 million lives lost on roads every year" for nearly eight years.

"Since 2009, our prototypes have spent the equivalent of 300 years of driving time on the road and we’ve led the industry from a place where self-driving cars seem like science fiction to one where city planners all over the world are designing for a self-driven future.

"Today, we’re taking our next big step by becoming Waymo, a new Alphabet business. Waymo stands for a new way forward in mobility. We’re a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around.

"We believe that this technology can begin to reshape some of the ten trillion miles that motor vehicles travel around the world every year, with safer, more efficient and more accessible forms of transport.

"We can see our technology being useful in personal vehicles, ridesharing, logistics, or solving last mile problems for public transport. In the long term, self-driving technology could be useful in ways the world has yet to imagine, creating many new types of products, jobs, and services."

Waymo’s is developing primarily Level 4 and Level 5 autonomous technology employing radar, camera and lidar sensors, and says its sensors can handle harsh conditions and difficult driving tasks, including "responding to emergency vehicles, mastering multi-lane four-way stops and anticipating what unpredictable humans will do on the road".

"We can adjust to unexpected changes like closed lanes or respond to complex cues at a railroad crossing. We’ve also taught our vehicles to drive defensively, so they try to stay out of blind spots and nudge away from large vehicles.

"We’ve honed these skills over 2 million miles of real-world driving, and in the last year alone we’ve completed one billion miles of testing in simulation.

"The ability to complete a fully self-driven trip on everyday public roads, with no test driver, was a big milestone for our team and the history of this technology. It was the signal that we could begin to shift our focus from foundational technical work towards launching our own company so we can offer many more rides, in more places, for more people.

"Since the early days of the project, our work has been shaped by feedback we’ve heard from the communities that will most benefit from self-driving cars. Our next step as Waymo will be to let people use our vehicles to do everyday things like run errands, commute to work, or get safely home after a night on the town."

Many car-makers already offer the basic technologies required for semi-autonomous driving, and a host of companies – including non-automotive players like Google, Apple and Uber — are now developing technologies that will allow cars to drive without any driver input.

The big questions are how far away are these cars from everyday reality?, who will be liable for their inevitable mistakes?, will they actually reduce traffic jams?, will country-specific legislation be ready for them? and will the general population embrace them?.