By Wendy Lee, San Francisco Chronicle
The CEO overseeing the Google self-driving car project said Tuesday the division is close to making its technology more widely available, potentially for ride-sharing or trucking.
“We are close to bringing this to a lot of people,” CEO John Krafcik told a group of reporters at a press briefing on Tuesday.
The self-driving car project, which launched in 2009, has long been one of Google’s moonshots, a long-term effort to bring autonomous vehicles without a steering wheel or pedals to public roads. On Tuesday, Krafcik said the project will now graduate out of the division that handles moonshots and become its own division called Waymo within Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
“It stands for a new way forward in mobility,” Krafcik said. Krafcik, a former Hyundai executive, did not offer any specifics in terms of how soon the company’s self-driving cars will come to market. He said options include ride-sharing, personal use, logistics in areas like trucking and in public transportation solutions.
On Tuesday morning, Bloomberg reported that Waymo will launch a ride-sharing service using Fiat Chrysler minivans as early as the end of next year. Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s head of technology, declined to comment on the report.
Earlier this year, Google had announced a partnership with Fiat Chrysler Group to test self-driving technology inside Pacifica minivans. Competitors, including Tesla and Uber, are pushing aggressively toward commercializing self-driving technologies. Waymo said Tuesday it is in the “build phase” of putting its next-generation sensors into the minivans.
Waymo executives emphasized that their technology is fully autonomous. However, Krafcik said vehicles that use Waymo technology may still have a steering wheel, due to regulatory issues.
"There isn’t a clear path to mass produce cars without steering wheels in them," he said.
The company said it reached a milestone in October 2015 when a blind man rode in a Google self-driving car on a public road by himself for the first time without a steering wheel or pedals in Austin, Texas.
Waymo said its mapping system can identify items and people on the road and predict their future actions. For example, a Waymo car can track identify a police car with flashing lights and a cyclist, and predict what direction that cyclist will go next. The self-driving car is also prepared for unexpected encounters, like a truck driving on the wrong side of the road or an animal crossing the road. Waymo’s self driving vehicle technology has undergone 2 million miles of “real world driving.”
“You really have to have a deeper understanding in the world,” Dolgov said.
Steve Mahan, a former CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center and the blind man who rode in the Waymo self-driving car in 2015, said riding in the self-driving car is like riding with “extremely good drivers.” Mahan lost his vision in 2004.
“I want very much to become a member of the driving public again, and this technology is going to bring that to pass. So I’m excited to be alive now and to have this exposure to the technology,” he said. “I am looking forward to the distribution of these vehicles into the driving arena.”
Waymo, like its parent company, will be based in Mountain View. Rob Enderle with advisory services consultants Enderle Group said that the spin-out of the Waymo division could lead to more opportunities to partner with other car companies, which distrust Google out of fear that it will build its own cars. Waymo emphasized Tuesday it is not a car company.
“Right now, the car companies don’t trust Google,” Enderle said. “If they were to spin it out, there would be a better chance that the unit would be more effective.”
©2016 the San Francisco Chronicle Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
