Google Announce Their Self-Driving Car Company

Google’s parent company Alphabet has revealed that they are rebranding their self-driving car project and given it its own independent company called Waymo.

The original project started by Google has now branched out into its own independent company, who will take the reins off of Google to continue the development of the autonomous-driving technology that hopes to make self-driving cars a reality.

Google has been working on the self-driving car since 2009 and has logged over a million miles on real roads, which according to John Krafcik (the CEO of the company) is the equivalent of 300 years of road driving.

Waymo’s first announcement was regarding their first completely self-driven ride, where a passenger road in the self-driving car that has no steering wheel or pedals and with no test driver on board. The test took place in Austin, Texas last year, here is the video: 

Waymo will continue to work on Google’s project which has been approved by three other cities for testing. The testing will take place in Mountain View, California; Kirkland, Washington and Metro Phoenix, Arizona.

Alphabet has taken many of Google’s projects and given them their own independent companies in order to give the projects more freedom. The company can now make deals and move forward on their own and has stated that one of their goals is to “commercialise this technology and build products that can help millions of people”.

According to their CEO, they are also working towards enabling people to use the self-driving cars for everyday things like the commute to work and errands in the near future.

Alphabet clearly has high hopes for the self-driving car and appears that they are also planning a minivan ride-sharing service with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles which could debut towards the end of 2017.

With Alphabet’s accelerating plans for Waymo it looks like driving could be a thing of the past sooner than we thought.