Goodbye, Google vehicle: Alphabet’s Waymo reportedly teams with auto manufacturers

Instead, according to a report from the Information, Google is placing its hopes in an existing deal with Fiat Chrysler, and Google cars will be minivans rather than the spacepods we’ve been expecting.

We’ve been hearing about Google’s self-driving vehicle ambitions for years, but lately the company seems to have slowed a bit, while would-be competitors like Tesla and NVIDIA are nipping at its heels.

In May, Google announced its first partnership with a vehicle manufacturer, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. The company is now looking forward to collaborating with other automakers for more conventional cars and possibly launching a shared autonomous ride service by the end of this year.

The company’s CEO, John Krafcik, wrote a detailed blog post on Medium talking about the past of the Self-Driving Car Project, and what its future may look like.

Yesterday, The Information reported that Alphabet is no longer focusing on building its own self-driving auto that would lack a steering wheel and pedals.

Today, Google’s Self-Driving Car Project officially graduated from the X labs at Alphabet.

As evidence, drive-sharing colossus Uber has recently proven to be among the most aggressive companies in the race to develop self-driving cars. On Apple News, please favorite the 1redDrop channel to get us in your news feed. Krafcik reassured reporters that Google remained focused on delivering fully self-driving vehicles.

In July, the project appointed its first general counsel and a month later it hired former Airbnb executive Shaun Stewart as director of the project, with a mandate to commercialise the company’s self-driving technology. “We are not in the business of making better cars”, Krafcik said in the Waymo announcement.

“We can imagine our self-driving technology being used in lots of different areas – ride-sharing business, in transportation, trucking, logistics, even personal use vehicles and licensing with automakers”, Krafcik said.

Up to date, Google has been a key player in researching autonomous vehicle technology.

About a year ago, there was a huge debate going on about whether the world really did need self-driving cars.