Waymo executives think people have taken its promises of self-driving cars too seriously. From a report: The Alphabet subsidiary “went through a lot of hype that was sort of unmanageable,” said Tekedra N. Mawakana, Waymo’s chief external officer. “Sometimes a lot of hype is so mismatched to what’s happening in the real world.” Mawakana said the reporting has become a bit more “grounded” today, but he went on to say that the hype had caused people to develop mistaken ideas like they would no longer be able to drive their own cars once self-driving cars became ubiquitous. “We want the ride to be amazingly boring,” Mawakana continued. “We don’t want the ride to be exciting.”
The company has dialed back its enthusiastic tone as it falls behind its original timeline for getting full self-driving cars on the road. The company said in 2017 that it wouldn’t need to wait until 2020 — when analysts expected self-driving cars to go fully autonomous — but that it would give riders the ability within “months.” Morgan Stanley cut its valuation on Waymo by 40% last month from $175 billion to $105 billion, concluding that the industry is moving toward commercialization slower than expected and that Waymo still relies on human safety drivers, which CNBC reported in August. But no company has been more instrumental in driving the hype around self-driving than Google. Consumer and media expectations arose based on what Waymo had told the press and public, dating back as far as 2012, when it was still known as Googleâ(TM)s self-driving car project.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot