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Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company (formerly under Google), has been using modified vans for years to privately test its autonomous tech. In late 2016, Waymo announced that its first production car would be a modified Chrysler Pacifica. Now the company is looking to buy a few more minivans - 62,000, to be exact.
After three days of non-stop announcements and developer talks, Google I/O 2018 has finally come to a close. Unless you were watching the event yourself, or if you were refreshing Android Police every minute, you probably missed a few things.
At a press conference today in New York, Waymo CEO John Krafcik announced the world's first premium electric self-driving car. The first collaboration of a planned long-term partnership with British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover, the Jaguar I-PACE will form part of Waymo's autonomous car fleet in 2020 after testing begins later this year.
Waymo, one of the main players in self-driving cars, announced today in a blog post that it is expanding its autonomous vehicle technology into big rig trucks. Though the company has been testing this tech for a little while now, it is ready to begin a pilot program in Atlanta to deliver cargo to Google datacenters.
By now, most of you have probably heard of Waymo, Google's (or should I say Alphabet's) self-driving tech company. You probably also know that self-driving cars have a metric crapton of sensors and tech on board, all of which is necessary to ensure that everyone stays safe. But if you were looking for a more visual representation of how exactly Waymo's cars see things, you might want to check the company's latest video out.
As the race to build the first commercially viable self-driving car hots up, a number of major players in the technology and automotive industries continue to position themselves, hoping to grab a slice of the potentially lucrative pie. This has led to a number of high-profile alliances being formed. Alphabet has its own arm dedicated to the technology in Waymo, which was spun off from Google late last year, and it has been keen to form useful partnerships where it can. The latest test vehicle is a minivan built by Chrysler, for instance. Now Waymo has a new ally in the form of ride-hailing start-up Lyft.
Google announced last week that it was getting out of the self-driving car business. That doesn't mean self-driving cars won't be a thing around Mountain View anymore; the project is simply being spun off into its own Alphabet company called Waymo. Now, Waymo CEO John Krafcik has posted some details of the company's first self-driving vehicle. It's a minivan built in cooperation with Chrysler.
We've been hearing about Google's self-driving car ambitions for years, but lately the company seems to have slowed a bit, while would-be competitors like Tesla and NVIDIA are nipping at its heels. To give its efforts a boost (or possibly just make the expense and organization more manageable), the formerly Google-branded self-driving car project is being spun off into a separate company under the Alphabet parent company. The new venture is called Waymo, as in "a new way forward in mobility."