We wondered what Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai meant when he said on their earnings call last Thursday that for Waymos, “there is future optionality for personal ownership.”
Well, we only had to wait a minute to find out. Waymo announced today that they’re developing autonomous technology with a little automotive manufacturer you may have heard of: Toyota.
Yes, that Toyota.
The two companies are teaming up to build a new vehicle platform for “next-generation personally owned vehicles.”
Difficult to Overstate the Potential Autonomous Driving Disruption
This news is pretty great. I’m underselling it. I can’t imagine a more disruptive partner that Waymo could have teamed up with for their first personally owned vehicle offering than Toyota.
As near as we can tell, Waymo is the safest autonomous driving platform on the road, logging serious mileage and delivering an experience fully 12.5 times safer than a human driver. That stat comes straight from the insurance industry, so not even internal analysis from Waymo.
Plus, our love of Toyota pickup trucks is well known. I can’t imagine a base vehicle that I would rather add autonomy to than a Toyota. Reliable, safe, the opposite of sexy (also, as it turns out, the opposite of the Model S, 3, X, and Y). This is like taking your most reliable car in your garage and giving them robot eyes. This absolutely rocks.
The Nitty Gritty Corporate Context
Waymo’s press release introduces something called Woven by Toyota as a “strategic enabler” of the partnership.
That sounds like corporate-speak for: “We have a whole autonomy division and forgot to tell anyone.”
Apparently, Toyota’s been quietly wrenching on their own ADS and ADAS systems. To understand ADS versus ADAS, think Waymo for the first, and Tesla’s Full Self-Driving for the second.
If you don’t drive a recently built Toyota, I do and I can tell you that they’re pretty spartan where autonomy is concerned. They implement very few autonomous functions, just around crash avoidance in my Tacoma’s case, but all of it functions perfectly. I like that in a crash avoidance system.
But Wait, There’s More
And while most of us know Waymo by its flagship autonmomous taxi product, the press release contains this bombshell:
“Waymo is building a generalizable driver that can be applied to a variety of vehicle platforms and businesses over time.”
So, expect more partnerships like this in the future. It’s just wild that Toyota is the first manufacturer to sign on the dotted line. Let me remind you: that’s the world’s largest carmaker by volume.
They’re not dabbling here. They’re jumping into the deep end of the autonomy pool and bringing a robot lifeguard with them.
Absolutely massive. We’re excited to see what comes of this.
