Google's newly renamed program for the development of autonomous vehicles, Waymo has now added the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan to its fleet, loaded with the self-driving technology previously developed by the tech giant, including an onboard computer and a whole series of sensors. The carmaker will soon deliver 100 vehicles, set to participate in the real-world testing on public roads.
The Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan had to undergo several technical modifications to integrate all of the onboard technology required for driverless operation, from the chassis to the drive train to the integrated electrical systems. The conversion took six months all in all. The modified vehicles should soon be taking to the roads of Michigan, Arizona and California.
According to Google parent company Alphabet, the development of self-driving vehicles could considerably reduce the number of road traffic accidents, in turn reducing the number of deaths on roads around the world (approximately 1.2 million per year worldwide).
In 2015, Google successfully completed its first entirely autonomous journey on a public road with a car that had neither a steering wheel nor pedals. However, Alphabet is by no means alone in the field of self-driving cars. The Google project is getting competition from Tesla technologies, at various stages of advancement, which recently demoed a self-driving Model X, as well as Uber, which runs a small fleet of "driverless cars" in the US.
