Waymo retires its cute self-driving car to focus on minivans

Waymo retires its cute self-driving car to focus on minivans

PanARMENIAN.Net - Waymo is done driving around the cute, steering-wheel-free autonomous cars that were introduced by Google back in 2014. In a blog post on Monday, June 12, 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, the Verge says.

“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.

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, The Verge says.

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.

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