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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google's self-driving car project will become an independent company [reuters.com] within Alphabet Inc. called "Waymo" [arstechnica.com].

From the announcement post [medium.com] on Medium:

Today, we're taking our next big step by becoming Waymo, a new Alphabet business. Waymo [waymo.com] stands for a new way forward in mobility. We're a self-driving technology company with a mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to move around.

[...] Waymo may be a new company, but we're building on advanced self-driving technology developed over many years at Google. On October 20, 2015, we completed the world's first fully-self driven car ride [medium.com]. Steve Mahan rode alone in one of our prototype vehicles, cruising through Austin's suburbs. Steve is legally blind, so our sensors and software were his chauffeur. His route reflected the way millions of people could use a self-driving car in everyday life: riding from a park to a doctor's office and through typical neighborhoods. This ride was possible because our cars can now handle the most difficult driving tasks [newco.co], such as detecting and responding to emergency vehicles [medium.com], mastering multi-lane four-way stops, and anticipating what unpredictable humans will do on the road. We've honed these skills over 2 million miles of real-world driving, and in the last year alone we've completed one billion miles of testing in simulation [medium.com].

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