Expert's Insight About "Google Serious About Self-Driving Vehicles Spins Off Project As New Company: Waymo"
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TACH's TAKE: Silicon Valley On Its Way To Disrupt The Auto Industry And Historic Need For Traditional Car Companies
San Francisco December 13, 2016; Alexandria Sage writing for Reuters reported that Alphabet Inc's Google self-driving car project will become an independent entity within the technology company called Waymo, executives said on Tuesday, signaling a willingness to finally monetize its valuable research amid fierce competition from rivals.
The announcement marks a crucial step in the development of Google's high-profile program, now in its seventh year. It has been at the forefront of self-driving technology, but is now being challenged by companies from Uber Technologies Inc to Apple Inc and traditional car companies.
"It's an indication of the maturity of our technology," John Krafcik, the project's chief executive, told reporters at a press conference in San Francisco. "We can imagine our self-driving tech being used in all sorts of areas."
Until now, the program has been part of secretive research unit Google X. Waymo stands for "A new way forward in mobility," according to Krafcik.
"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.
Fiat Chrysler, Google's first partner, teamed up with the tech company in May to work together to integrate Google's self-driving system with the carmaker's minivans.
The alliance, which was not exclusive, allowed Fiat Chrysler to avoid the major research costs in developing its own autonomous program, and let Google better understand how to refine its systems for use in regular production cars.
Google has been striving to perfect an autonomous vehicle that will require zero human intervention - a philosophy at odds with some other automakers developing partial autonomy, which requires some driver supervision. Google's self-driving cars have driven over 2 million miles and testing now focuses on the trickiest scenarios faced by cars on surface streets.
Editing for Reuters By Bernard Orr
Expert's Comments:
Dr. Steve Arnold, Publisher of Beyond Search and Noted Googleoligist Excerpt From Complete Article. Google has reportedly stopped work on creating its own fully autonomous vehicles, as part of a shake-up of its development efforts on self-driving car technologies. Google has been working on such vehicles for years now, revealing its first complete self-driving car two years ago. But it now faces intensifying competition from other firms, some of which appear to be making swifter progress.
Carey Russ Automotive Journalist and Auto Channel Senior Editor
No surprise — we can have stricter licensing requirements (like Europe) or dumb things down with Technolo-G!™ It’s the (dumbass) American Way! And cars are rapidly becoming electronic devices anyway — good for maybe 100 to 200k miles and then scrap as replacing the by-then obsolete electronics wouldn’t be cost-effective. Great for the wealthy, the rest of us are fuc-ed. The best new cars will be the worst-ever used cars…
Larry Nutson, Chicago Bureau Chief The Auto Channel
Ford has taken the step and said they will develop a level-4 autonomous car
with no controls that would enable a driver to take over control. The
ability for a human to re-engage with a car in a split-second is not
realistic and therefore we won't see cars that can be both. We may never see
self-driving cars and human-driven cars sharing the same road. I can
envision dedicated lanes or roads exclusively for self-driving cars in well
geo-mapped areas with favorable weather conditions. Google is correct to
focus its expertise on the technology to help make this happen.
Martha Hindes, Auto Journalist and Senior Auto Channel Contributor
It's all about acceptance. With truly self driving cars, better
prepare for another new high tech industry to emerge. That's the IT
security needs of self driving cars. Never happen you say? Who would
have considered, when personal computers first emerged, that black
hats playing with software would spawn multi-billion dollar costs for
companies – and governments – to attempt to protect themselves.
Wouldn't that prospect give you a real sense of security when you're
out on the road with no controls?
Dr. William Sharfman, Automotive Journalist & Consultant
The sedan of today has so much sensing, servo, and driver assist, you can tell the autonomous car is virtually here now. But you can have only three conditions here: one is you're driving and all this technology is surrounding you to help out, you're driving, but human, merely human. Two, the car is going to do the whole thing, in which case the driver can't suddenly intervene or decide to drive, to take over, because border conditions are exceedingly dangerous, as well as hard to create control algorithms for, and drivers simply aren't going to be prepared to "pick up" and go when alarmed or smitten with the bug. You can interrupt assistance easily enough: touch it, it's yours. Third, you could envision creating a bi-modal device, which will operate in a mutually exclusive either/or manner, and so have full controls, and it's either doing it for you, or you're doing it and it's assisting as appropriate, and that'd be the most complex unit. An airplane does that now, it wants to know, hey boss, are you flying or am I?
There are of course eternal legal liability questions that the sales prevention department will intrude upon, and with some reason, it's paid to, and there are structure and infrastructure issues of integration or degree of integration with what's around that's also required, and those will proliferate. Airplanes flying themselves are intrinsically safer than cars being driven by guys, but that's the world. Autonomous driving is here, it's not just at UMTRI or Google's campus, the States are every day dealing with what about the damn autonomous vehicles making their way around on our roads.
Gettin' there.
Katrina Parish Ramser, Senior Editor The Auto Channel
In simple terms, it's not surprising. From head to tail lights, our transportation is being handed off to machines with no need for human interaction anymore.
Rebecca Lindland, senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book
“With over a billion miles of simulated driving, and over two million of real-world driving, Google is in the lead position of self-driving technology. The question remains whether consumers are ready for this as well, since most prefer at least an option to take over the driving.”
Michelle Krebs, senior analyst for Autotrader
<“Google focusing on the software and the technology for self-driving vehicles make more sense, since that is its expertise, than trying to be a full-fledged automaker. By supplying its technology to others, Google has the opportunity to proliferate self-driving vehicles in a way many others cannot.”
Michael Harley, analyst for Kelley Blue Book
“Google has taken a giant leap forward by engineering and successfully operating a fully autonomous vehicle, lacking traditional driver controls, on public roads. The company’s pioneering approach to autonomous technology has been to focus its efforts on completely rethinking passenger transportation, not simply adapting a traditional automobile to autonomous capability. Demonstrating its innovation, Google developed its own hardware and wrote its own software specifically for vehicles without a steering wheel or pedals, which makes other automakers chasing self-driving automation appear terribly shortsighted.”