Google is heavily invested in self-driving cars and its technology has shown a great amount of improvement over the past few years. Tests have since been expanded to more cities and last year the company even came up with its very own prototype. It kicked off these efforts with retrofitted cars initially and later introduced its own prototype. According to a new report, Google is gradually beefing up the team working on this project and adding more talent that has previous experience in the automotive industry.
Reuters reports that there are close to 200 people working on the self-driving car project at Google now. Most of them are systems and software engineers while some have been picked from other departments from Google.
Almost 50 members of the team have previous experience in the automotive industry with some coming from companies like Ford, General Motors and even Tesla.
Google has not yet confirmed how many people are in the team that works on its self-driving car technology so the figures are estimates. While the company has said that it wants to create marketable self-driving cars by the year 2020, it hasn’t confirmed if it wants to manufacture those cars itself or link up with a manufacturing partner.
Recent rumors have suggested that Google and Ford might partner up for this purpose. Ford is just one of the legacy car makers that’s trying to push the envelope on autonomous driving technologies. The race is well and truly on to deliver self-driving cars to consumers by the end of this decade.
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