Just over a week after news of Waymo returning to San Francisco to train its autonomous fleet, the Alphabet division has announced a new city. The self-driving Chrysler Pacifica will soon be tested on the roads of Atlanta, Georgia.
Waymo made great strides throughout 2017 that culminated with the announcement that a public ride service is coming soon to Phoenix. Now, Alphabet’s self-driving division is returning to San Francisco to test its autonomous Chrysler Pacifica vehicles.
The Waymo case against Uber was due to begin in October, but was delayed to give the Alphabet division more time to examine last-minute evidence. Rescheduled to begin next week, the trial has again been postponed after information and other bombshell allegations that Uber withheld have surfaced.
Back in May, Alphabet’s Waymo announced that its autonomous vehicles have driven three million miles on public roads since the program’s inception in 2009. Six months later, that total has increased to four million miles.
Following eight years of development and a recent public awareness campaign, Waymo’s self-driving cars are now transporting passengers without a human behind the wheel. These fully autonomous rides started in mid-October and in the coming months will expand to the public as part of a ride-hailing service.
Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber was surprising on a number of fronts, including Google and Alphabet’s normal hesitancy towards suits. However, as it stated, Waymo found Uber’s actions a particularly large affront. Reuters has now discovered what Waymo is demanding from Uber in settlement talks to stop the case from going to trial.
With Waymo rumored to launch a ride-hailing service in the coming months, the Alphabet division is launching a public education campaign about self-driving cars. First rolling out in Arizona, Waymo wants to inform the world about the advantages of autonomous vehicles.
Lawsuits are always fascinating in what information gets brought to light as part of the proceedings, and Google’s are no different. One inadvertent slip-up has revealed that Google spent $1.1 billion developing its autonomous technology from 2009 to 2015.
Back in June, Waymo was rumored to be working on self-driving semi trucks, with images of such a vehicle emerging later that month. Meanwhile, the Alphabet division also began exploring a ride-sharing service in Phoenix this year.
During an interview today, CEO John Krafcik confirmed Waymo’s work on both and how their autonomous technology might first come to market through either of those uses.
While real-world experience is important for training self-driving cars, virtual driving is increasingly playing a bigger and bigger role for Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle division. This Carcraft virtualization works in tandem with a “secret base” known as Castle where Waymo has built a city that can quickly be reconfigured to different testing scenarios.
Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car company, has been test-driving its custom Chrysler Pacifica minivans in Phoenix, Arizona for the last couple of months. This public-facing testing is to help teach Waymo’s cars and minivans how to drive independently on public streets. Now, the company has been working with a local police and fire department to train the self-driving minivans to better recognize and react to emergency vehicles…
This past Friday saw a flurry of developments in Waymo’s case against Uber, including the Alphabet company toning down its patent infringement claims to focus on trade secret theft. As part of the upcoming October trial, a magistrate judge has granted Uber the ability to depose Larry Page.
At the insistence of the presiding U.S. District Judge, Waymo has reduced the number of patent-infringement claims it is waging against Uber to all but one. Rather, the Alphabet division (via Bloomberg) will be focusing on the theft of trade secrets in its upcoming trial.
At Google I/O this week, Audi and Volvo will show off infotainment systems in their cars built around the Android operating system. To be clear, these aren’t one of the 300 Android Auto compatible car models that have launched since 2014.
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Waymo has been telegraphing over the past few months that its autonomous technology is ready for wider use. Now, the Alphabet division has signed a deal with Lyft to boost its effort and bring self-driving cars into the mainstream.
Last week, we reported on Electrek that by adding 300 Chevy Bolt EV to its self-driving test fleet, GM was on its way to having the biggest captive self-driving test fleet in the world, but Waymo just crushed that dream today.
Waymo, formerly Google’s self-driving effort and now an official Alphabet company, announced that it is deploying 500 self-driving Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan in Phoenix. Interestingly, it’s not only about gathering data from driving since they will also give actual rides to the public through a new program.
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The last time we talked about Google’s former self-driving car head Chris Urmson was back in the summer of 2016, and since then, he has gone on to found a stealth (also self-driving-related) startup by the name of Aurora Innovation. Now, SEC filings (via Axios) reveal that the startup has raised over $3 million in venture capital…
Alphabet’s self-driving car unit hasn’t been a stranger to the inconvenience of constantly rotating staff, but now we’re hearing about one interesting piece of Waymo’s situation in particular that helps explain recent trouble retaining talent. According to a new report out of Bloomberg, early staffers were paid in an unusual way that later severely inflated compensation and led to exodus of early staff…
At the North American International Auto Show on Sunday, Waymo CEO John Krafcik went into detail about Google’s self-driving technology and its new in-house built sensor suite. He also revealed that the fleet of Chrysler Pacifica minivans announced last month will hit the road by the end of January (via The Verge).
In October, we got our first look through spy shots at the Chrysler Pacifica minivans that Google has been outfitting with its self-driving technology. Today, Chrysler and Waymo, the new Alphabet company created out of Google’s self-driving effort, have officially unveiled the final design of a Chrysler Pacifica with self-driving hardware.
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Google has announced today at a small press event in San Francisco, California that its self-driving car project is spinning off into its own company and getting a new name: Waymo. This news follows a report from earlier today that Google has backed off plans for radical self-driving cars in run-up to its launch…
An electric self-driving Chrysler Pacifica is Google’s first confirmed partnership
Google has long said that it has no plans to manufacture self-driving cars itself, instead partnering with auto makers, but it had been thought that it might press ahead with cars without steering wheels or pedals. However, a new report from The Information suggests that parent company Alphabet has now ‘backed off’ these plans in favor of something more conventional.
The report also echoes a much earlier one on the company’s intentions for the self-driving car project …
While Tesla’s fleet recently reached 222 million miles driven on Autopilot in about a year, Google’s fleet of self-driving cars just passed the 2-million miles mark last month after 7 years on the road. As we previously discussed, Tesla’s Autopilot miles are not really equivalent to Google’s self-driving miles, but it still gives us a good indication of the speed at which each company is deploying their semi-autonomous and autonomous programs.
Now Google is about to speed up its effort by deploying a lot more vehicles through its partnership with Fiat-Chrysler to build a fleet of self-driving Pacifica, Chrysler’s new plug-in hybrid minivan. The first few prototypes were spotted in Mountain View over the weekend.
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Google’s self-driving cars are no stranger to accidents, but rarely are the autonomous cars at fault and rarely do those accidents cause any significant damage. Today, it seems, may be an exception for the latter case, with one of the Mountain View company’s Lexus self-driving vehicles sustaining major damage in an accident involving a commercial van…
