Google is “very actively” working on how to put its driverless cars to public use in the next three years, according to the founder of its experimental “X” lab, after the search company’s recent breakthroughs in autonomous navigation of city streets.
In 2012, Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, set a 2017 deadline for bringing its driverless cars to market. But after launching the initiative in 2009, it still does not have any commercial partnerships to show for the ambitious multimillion-dollar project.
At a demonstration of its self-driving car technology at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Sebastian Thrun, founder of Google X, said there was a “big debate internally” over whether to partner with existing automotive companies or make its own cars.
“We are thinking very actively how this can transition into the physical world of physical people,” he said, adding that the effort was centred less on revenue than on “how to get normal people to use the technology”.
“I would not think about how they make money,” said Mr Thrun, who now works part time at Google X and also runs Udacity, an online learning company. “Much more important for us at Google is how can we make the world a better place.”