Google’s gearing up to spin off its self-driving cars business
Google's self-driving cars are getting a life of their own.
X lab, the autonomous vehicle project, is becoming a standalone unit of Google's parent company Alphabet; possibly the first step on its journey to becoming an independent company.
The wheels were set in motion at the beginning of the year when Alphabet started separating the car group's finances in January. It is now in the process of completing a series of corporate and legal moves to become its own business.
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John Krafcik, chief executive of Google's self-driving car division, said the unit was "part way through" the same process Alphabet's healthcare subsidiary Verily went through last year.
He told both the WSJDLive and Nikkei Innovation Forum conferences that: "The car is part way through what we call a graduation."
"The self-driving car project, like Verily, will soon be its own independent entity in the world".
While he wouldn't be drawn further on a timescale, simply saying the move was happening "soon", Krafcik did reveal logistical questions were being dealt with, such as what the standalone firm will be called.
Google's experimental X lab started work on developing fully autonomous cars nearly eight years ago and so far, Google cars have covered over two million miles.
But competition is hotting up, with both traditional car firms and newer names like Tesla and Uber seeking to get in on the action.
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Recently, Tesla's founder Elon Musk has been trying to win public favour with a challenger to Uber. Musk is drawing up an autonomous car-sharing service, which he says will predominantly give car owners a way to make money from their electric vehicles when they aren't using them, rather than be used to bump up Tesla's bottom line.
"It's not Tesla versus Uber. It's the people versus Uber," he said. Miaow.