Google spins off self-driving car unit to new company Waymo

Google's CEO for Self-Driving Car Project, John Krafick, announced in a blog post  yesterday that the company's effort to build and test a driverless car had gone from a research project to a business.

"Since 2009, our prototypes have spent the equivalent of 300 years of driving time on the road and we've led the industry from a place where self-driving cars seem like science fiction to one where city planners all over the world are designing for a self-driven future," wrote Krafcik, in the blog post. "Today, we're taking our next big step by becoming Waymo, a new Alphabet business."

Waymo, he said, stood for a new way forward in mobility. He added, it would be a business operating under the Alphabet umbrella, much like Google, Nest Labs, GoogleX and Google Fiber.

"We're a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around," wrote Krafcik. "We believe that this technology can begin to reshape some of the ten trillion miles that motor vehicles travel around the world every year, with safer, more efficient and more accessible forms of transport."

The company, which had been a key player in  autonomous vehicle technology, had been testing its driverless cars on city streets and also on highways, logging millions of miles.

''We're now an independent company within the Alphabet umbrella,'' Waymo CEO John Krafcik told an audience at a press event in San Francisco yesterday. Krafcik also noted that the Waymo team conducted the first fully driverless ride on public roads in Austin last year, using a car with no steering wheels and no pedals in ''everyday traffic'' on city streets.

Steve Mahan, a legally blind friend of Waymo principal engineer Nanthaniel Fairfiel d rode the vehicle solo. The vehicle successfully negotiated traffic, pedestrians, stops etc in the Austin streets.