Google in talks with Ford Motor to help build driver-less cars

Google is reportedly discussing with automaker Ford Motor Co to help build the internet search company's autonomous cars, Automotive News reported, citing a person with knowledge of the project.

If the contract manufacturing deal is finalised, it could come during the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in the first week of January, the report said.

A Google spokesman told Automotive News, the company would not comment on speculation, though Google officials confirmed that the company was talking to automakers.

Earlier this year, Google started discussions with most of the world's top automakers and assembled a team of traditional and nontraditional suppliers to bolster efforts to bring self-driving cars to the market by 2020.

In June, Google started testing tiny, bubble-shaped self-driving prototype vehicles of its own design on public roads around Mountain View. The company had also started testing self-driving prototypes in Austin.

Google was expected to make its self-driving cars unit, which would offer rides for hire, a stand-alone business under its parent company, Alphabet, next year, according to an earlier Bloomberg report.

Meanwhile, although Ford lagged behind most competitors, it ramped up its pace to develop self-driving cars earlier this year and said it planned to expand advanced safety technology, including automatic braking, to allow hands-free operation of cars under certain conditions with automation of such basic functions as steering, braking and throttle.

This was to be featured in its global lineup over the next five years. Meanwhile, according to commentators a huge question that everyone from government regulators to tech companies and safety advocates had been wrestling with was: 'if robots would drive people around, deliver meals, baby-sit the elderly, replace doctors in operating rooms and fight wars, could they be trusted to behave safely?'

"This is the most essential question of the whole matter," said Andrew Platzer, who researches car, aircraft and robotic safety at Carnegie Mellon University. "It's a very difficult question, how you can know for sure that the system itself is actually really safe," Los Angeles Times reported in its online edition.

With the development of robotics technology happening in a wide range of fields, a regulatory gap was challenging the way our society looked at evaluation of safety.

For instance, whether driver-less cars could be regulated by state DMVs or the US Department of Transportation both of which lacked deep knowledge of robotics was a moot question in the emerging scenario. 

"The government itself is not acting as a repository of expertise here," said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington and expert on technology policy. "I worry quite a bit that government will over-rely on experts from industry because they don't have their own internal knowledge," LA Times reported.