Google self-driving tech unit Waymo won't make cars
Google has turned its autonomous-vehicle project into a standalone unit, Waymo, focused on creating self-driving technology, but not cars. Waymo's technology could be used in "ridesharing, in transportation, trucking, logistics" as well as "personal use vehicles and licensing with automakers, public transport and solving the last mile", said CEO John Krafcik. "We’re not in the business of making better cars. We’re in the business of making better drivers."
Pushing Waymo into the real world is something of a catchup move for Google. The company once dominated the conversation about autonomy, insisting it was possible years before most companies took it seriously. But lately, that preeminence has faded. In the past year, Uber, Tesla, Baidu, Ford, and General Motors have announced aggressive plans to bring fully self-driving cars to market, with launch dates ranging from next year to 2021. Meanwhile, pressure to prove Google's X projects could deliver on their promises mounted within the company, and a series of executives abandoned Google's project, including longtime technical lead Chris Urmson, who was reportedly unhappy with Krafcik's leadership.

As Uber and nuTonomy welcomed the public into self-driving cars in Pittsburgh and Singapore, respectively, Google's car team ignored questions about how and when it would commercialize its tech. Reports claimed it was scaling back its ambitions. The effort started to look like an also-ran. Launching Waymo, at least in the public eye, puts the robot-car division back in the race.

Waymo

Leading the Blind

Google has long pitched self-driving cars as a way to cut down on traffic deaths (more than a million worldwide every year) and as a tool for those who cannot drive. It's an altruistic spin on an industry whose potential value Boston Consulting Group pegs at $42 billion a year by 2025. So putting Steve Mahan in the car feels like a publicity stunt---look at our good deeds!---until you talk to the man.

Mahan started losing his vision at the age of 37, in 1990, due to a rare genetic disease called nanophthalmos. He was blind in one eye within a few years, and lost sight in the other after a laser treatment in 2004. (Doctors salvaged about 10 percent of his vision, but expect him to lose even that, eventually.) He stopped driving soon after, and for the past decade has relied on generous family and friends, and onerous paratransit services, to get from his suburban home in Morgan Hill, California, to anywhere else. Losing that independence, he says, was traumatic.

Hitting the green "go" button in the Google pod washed away some of that anguish, at least for a moment. "I was given the opportunity to be the man that I was before, for the time that I spent in that car," Mahan says. "It just let me be a whole person again."

Mahan had ridden in Google's car twice before. In 2012, he rode with an engineer and police escort; in 2014, in a closed parking lot.2 Last year's Austin expedition was his first solo trip, and the closest approximation to what an autonomous car service could offer. "This trip was about showing that we can actually take that capability and turn it into something that's ready to go out into the real world," says Nathaniel Fairfield, who runs Waymo's planning, control, and routing team, and has been on board since the project launched.