Waymo retires autonomous 'pod' minicar in favour of minivans
Alphabet subsidiary Waymo has retired its small steering-wheel-free autonomous vehicle in favour of integrating self-driving technology into other vehicles, such as the Chrysler Pacifica minivan. In a blogpost, Waymo said it had decided to "retire our fleet of Fireflies", with the hope that integrating their technology would bring about "fully self-driving technology to more people, more quickly". 

Waymo is done driving around the cute, steering-wheel-free autonomous cars that were introduced by Google back in 2014. In a blog post this afternoon, Waymo leaders write that time has come to “retire our fleet of Fireflies” — their name for the tiny cars — and focus instead of integrating self-driving technology into other vehicles, like the Chrysler Pacifica minivans Waymo put on the road earlier this year.

“By focusing on mass-produced vehicles like the Pacifica minivan, we’ll be able to bring fully self-driving technology to more people, more quickly,” the Waymo leaders write. They also say that focusing on mass-produced vehicles opens up more opportunities for testing, since the Fireflies were limited to a top speed of 25 miles per hour.

Waymo is focusing on technology, not complete vehicles

The move shows Google pretty definitely moving away from producing its own vehicles and competing with automakers to instead focusing on collaborating with and selling technology to any automakers that are interested. While Google will be competing with quite a few other companies at this point to sell self-driving tech, it has a head start on testing; and ultimately, selling the technology is going to be a lot easier than figuring out how to mass produce and market its own self-driving cars.