Waymo & Toyota May Collaborate On Autonomous Cars

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Waymo and Toyota have agreed to explore a possible deal that could one day lead to a new vehicle designed for ride-hailing and even bring autonomous driving technology to consumer cars. Now before we get all jiggly over this news, let’s unpack some of the words and phrases in that opening sentence — “explore,” “possible deal,” “one day.” This is less than a grand pronouncement. In fact it is more open-ended, pie in the sky puffery than actual news. Still, if nothing else, it is a sign post on the highway to the horizontal elevators many companies seem to think we need. We will talk more about that in a moment.

The two companies have signed a preliminary agreement to look into developing and deploying an autonomous vehicle platform, according to Waypoint, the official blog for Waymo. The language used by the companies is vague and essentially comes down to a “hey, let’s see how we might work together arrangement, TechCrunch observed. A spokesperson said more details will be shared if there is a definitive agreement.

If there is a path forward for the two companies, it would combine their respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform for use in a robotaxi service. There is a possibility that platform could also be integrated into future automobiles from Toyota.

“Toyota is committed to realizing a society with zero traffic accidents and becoming a mobility company that delivers mobility for all,” said Hiroki Nakajima, executive vice president of Toyota, and added his company shares “a strong sense of purpose and a common vision with Waymo in advancing safety through automated driving technology.”

The timing of the announcement is notable. Last week, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai made remarks during the company’s earnings call that suggested Waymo was looking at personally owned autonomous vehicles. Waymo has talked vaguely about licensing its tech before, but this was the first time the top executive of the parent company spoke publicly about the possibility. Currently, Waymo operates robotaxi services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, with Atlanta scheduled to be added soon. The company currently provides more than 250,000 autonomous rides each week in those cities.

Bloomberg reports the global auto sector is increasingly betting that the future of transport lies in autonomous vehicles, and other Japanese companies are pursuing their own partnerships. Nissan and Wayve announced a partnership in the UK in early April, while Suzuki is collaborating with a startup called Tier IV.

Autonomous Driving & Reality

Elon Musk says he expects Tesla to have some major news about its autonomous driving cars by June…or so. It’s Elon, so take that for what it’s worth. The twist is that instead of its Cybercab robotaxi, which may or may not ever get into production, now the company is back to saying its current production cars will be the first self-driving Teslas. Many CleanTechnica readers will recall it was not all that long ago that Tesla was refusing to let those who had leased a Model 3 buy their cars at the end of the lease, presumably because Tesla was going to turn them all into robotaxis and make a zillion dollars. It’s hard to tell with Elon what, if anything, he says is accurate. More and more, he appears to be just a bloviating jackass who gets his jollies by telling others what to do. The Tesla robotaxi plan is still a puzzle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

Lloyd Alter writes a sustainability blog called Carbon Upfront! If you are not familiar with it, I recommend you visit and poke around a bit. Alter, who was the public face of Treehugger for more than a decade, examines many of the same issues that concern CleanTechnica readers. The Waymo/Toyota announcement struck a nerve with him because he has been thinking — and writing — about autonomous vehicles since at least 2011, when he spent a weekend at the Institute without Boundaries, now called the Brookfield Sustainability Institute, discussing the role of the car in 2040.

“We concluded that the car would be electric, it wouldn’t look like a car today, and it would be a mobile extension of our homes. Where many AV visionaries thought they would be shared, since our cars are parked 96% of the time, I came to believe they will be very, very personal — like our living room or bedroom. In fact, I thought they might well become our living room or bedroom,” Alter writes in his latest blog post. In that post, he quotes from a 2016 essay entitled Perpetual Motion Machines written by Chenoe Hart.

“With a system of automated vehicles, transit passengers will no longer need to pay any attention while distances are being traversed. With the possibility of traffic collisions theoretically eliminated, safety requirements mandating fixed seats, air bags, and seat belts would become obsolete. Passengers who no longer needed to be restrained would be able to move around freely.

After ease of handling becomes an irrelevant design consideration for new vehicles steered by computers, designers will be free to stretch wheelbases, raise ceiling heights, and specify softer suspensions to make that movement more natural and comfortable. And since the people inside wouldn’t necessarily need to see where they were going, a growing range of possible wall fixtures — storage cabinets, LCD screens, perhaps a kitchen sink — could substitute passenger convenience over views of the world outside. The elimination of the driver will mean the end of the car as a car.”

That is provocative thinking, but the connected car — pioneered by the Tesla Model S — really opened the door to such a conflation of transportation and living room. What is the business case for the proposed Afeela collaboration between Sony and Honda if not to sell people on the idea of a car that is basically an extension of the living room?

Devin Liddell of Fast Company thought the whole idea of a living room on wheels could benefit older people. Autonomous RV-like vehicles with architectural elements would blur the lines between vehicles and buildings and allow older citizens to stay in their homes indefinitely. Visits to the grandkids wouldn’t mean a grandparent co-opting a bedroom. Instead, their micro-apartment would travel with them.

Alter picks up on that vision and speculates that soon the roadway “might be filled with rolling homes full of boomers autonomously moving from buffet restaurant to doctors office to charging station to Arizona in the winter. I love this idea, going to bed in Buffalo and telling my home to take me to Chicago for a ballgame.”

Chenoe Hart wrote, “Our understanding of a house as a stable locus of physical and emotional shelter could become diluted. There would be no reason for homes to not also be vehicles.” She worries that AVs will challenge our definitions of time and space, and that it will not end well.

“Driverless cars posit a possible future without street life and without spaces for spontaneity,” Alter says. “As with previous planning mistakes in developing automotive-oriented cities, carmakers and technology companies are moving forward with their ideas without reckoning with the full range of potential social impacts. These futures must be imagined before they can be embraced or resisted. Otherwise driverless cars may steer society into a blind cul-de-sac, and we will discover we have nowhere left to go. If how we get around dictates what we build, we had better think carefully about where our self-driving cars take us. It may be a whole different world.”

Seems like the perfect time to repeat the trite but still relevant mantra — “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”