Google To Partner With Car Manufacturers For Self-Driving Cars

Given that Google isn’t a car manufacturer, we reckon that if the company had plans to mass produce their self-driving cars, they’d either have to spend a ton of money setting up the process, or they could approach it like they would with Android, which is to license out their technology to other companies with those capabilities.

Now earlier we had heard that General Motors had expressed their interest in working with Google in developing self-driving cars, and recently Google themselves had announced that they too are looking to work with other car manufacturers as well. In an interview with Chris Urmson, the director of Google’s self-driving car project, he was quoted as saying, “We’d be remiss not to talk to … the biggest auto manufacturers. They’ve got a lot to offer.”

Urmson also revealed some potential partners that they would be working with which includes General Motors along with Ford, Toyota, Daimler AG, and Volkswagen AG. Urmson added, “For us to jump in and say that we can do this better, that’s arrogant.” At the moment Google’s prototypes are made by a specialty manufacturing company called Roush where they are built in Detroit.

Now if you were looking to forward to seeing self-driving cars in the future, Google stated that we would have to wait at least until 2020, but this is just talking about Google’s efforts as the laws and regulations could still take a while to catch up before self-driving cars are made 100% legal to be driven on public roads.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Transportation
Tags: Google