Google Seeks Partners for Self-Driving Car
Head of Project Says Company Doesn’t Want to Become ‘Car Maker’
By Joseph B. White And Rolfe Winkler
The Wall Street Journal
Dec. 19, 2014 5:06 p.m. ET
Google Inc. is looking for auto industry partners to bring its vision of a self-driving car to market within the next five years, the head of the software giant’s autonomous-vehicle project said Friday.
“We don’t particularly want to become a car maker,” Chris Urmson, the project’s director, said in an interview. “We are talking [with] and looking for partners.”
Mr. Urmson said his team, in the meantime, is working with automotive suppliers to build a fleet of more-advanced, “beta one” prototype Google cars, moving three generations beyond the stripped-down models shown last spring. Google plans to start on-road testing of these cars early in 2015.
The biggest challenges for Google’s efforts involve software, not hardware, Mr. Urmson said. Google is confident, for instance, that it has laser radar technology, or LIDAR, that can provide accurate images of a car’s surroundings at a reasonable cost, he said.
The self-driving car project is at the center of Google X, the search giant’s secretive skunk works lab that is working on contact lenses that measure blood-glucose levels, balloon-powered Internet service, giant TV screens, the Web-connected eyewear Google Glass, and more.
Google executives hope the portfolio of ambitious projects—dubbed “moonshots”—will change the world in fundamental ways. At a conference this summer, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he hopes the self-driving car will “transform transportation around the world, and reduce the need for individual car ownership, the need for parking, road congestion and so forth.”
But the bigger the bet, the higher the risk of failure, as Google Glass has shown. Criticized as nerdy and not very useful, the eyewear has faced setbacks this year including the departure of many employees working on the project, and a failure to entice developers to create a wide range of software for the device.
In the case of the self-driving car project, Mr. Urmson said Google recognizes there are “a lot of amazing companies in the Detroit area and internationally that know how to make cars” and that “it would be goofy for us to try to replicate” their expertise.
While Google has decided that forming partnerships with car makers and automotive suppliers is the right approach to eventually building autonomous vehicles in large scale, Mr. Urmson said: “We are still assessing the business model. We don’t know what the right relationship is.”
Auto industry executives are concerned about how partnerships with Google would be structured, because the terms could affect their efforts to build their brands, their relationships with customers and profit from the valuable data that could be generated by self-driving cars.
There are also some important differences between the strategy Google is pursuing to develop and bring its technology to drivers and the way auto makers are approaching automated driving.
Google wants to develop a fully automated car that doesn’t require any input from the driver. Mr. Urmson said it is difficult to get a driver who isn’t paying attention to the road to suddenly—and safely—retake the wheel. Further, he said, a partially automated car “ doesn’t help a blind man get lunch or help an aging widow get to her social events.”
This is why Google is developing designs that would entail no steering wheel. For now, Mr. Urmson said his team is working on vehicles that would operate at speeds below 25 miles an hour—which would qualify Google’s car as a neighborhood electric vehicle that doesn’t have to be equipped with air bags or meet certain other safety standards required of conventional cars.
One scenario for such vehicles would be to position them in a city’s central business district and allow people to summon the cars with a smartphone app, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a recent report. Mr. Urmson said that is one avenue the company could pursue.
Executives at established auto companies and automotive technology suppliers are more cautious. They are pushing ahead with plans to deploy automated driving features step by step, but for now are insisting that drivers are still responsible for the car.
A growing number of vehicles available today have systems that can keep the car centered in a marked lane, brake and steer automatically and maintain a safe distance behind another vehicle. However, no established car maker has enabled a vehicle to operate for an extended period of time without the driver’s hands on the wheel.
By 2016, some cars could start appearing that allow hands-free driving in traffic jams or during highway cruising. General Motors Co. says it will offer what it calls “super cruise” in a 2016 Cadillac sedan. German auto brands Mercedes-Benz and Audi have signaled they plan to offer hands-free driving systems in roughly the same time frame.
Auto industry executives say they expect that by around 2020, more highly automated cars will go on sale that can largely pilot themselves in most situations. The industry consensus is that it will take until 2025 to perfect the technology for fully self-driving cars.
Google’s goal remains to field a fully autonomous car by 2017-2020, though Mr. Urmson said his priority is to ensure that the technology is safe and reliable, not to hit a deadline.
Auto makers also worry that self-driving cars will be ready before government safety rules are in place to sanction them, and before questions are resolved as to who is responsible when an automated vehicle crashes.
Mr. Urmson is scheduled to address a big auto industry convention, the Automotive News World Congress, in Detroit next month, an event many potential partners from the established auto industry will attend.
Auto industry executives are following Google’s work on self-driving vehicle systems closely, not least because the software company is hiring engineers they would like to have on their staff.
Mr. Urmson wouldn’t discuss staffing or budget levels, but he said his group is hiring.
Write to Joseph B. White at joseph.white@wsj.com and Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com
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