This is what our future looks like. Oslo’s Electri-City. Tesla’s Self Driving package. And now, tech startup Waymo has teamed up with Volvo’s Polestar to further the autonomous-vehicle agenda in a new level 4 strategic partnership. Somewhere in inventor’s paradise, Nikola Tesla’s having a ball. I mean EVs, wireless taxis, it’s the dream, right?
Anyhow, the details are still blurry as to what exactly this partnership will entail, but we’ve got a few things to go with.
Who are Waymo?
Do you remember Google’s self-driving car initiative from 2009? Yeah, it’s that under a new alias after it legally changed its name to Waymo in 2016. Don’t really get it to be honest, it’s like Waymo what? Ah well, that’s Google’s beef, not ours, we’ll just stick to the pork ribs #dadjokes.
So what Waymo want to do is create a future where driving will be safer through the implementation of the most advanced self-driving technology yet.
According to them, driving’s no longer fun or safe, and they make a fair point about the latter, but as to the former, well, have any of them driven down Highway 41 while it’s raining and alligators are creeping onto the asphalt left and right? Don’t know about you, but that’s horror-movie levels fun…
Who are Polestar?
You don’t need to go further than their slogan to figure them out. “Goodbye normal.” It’s like if Steve Jobs was CEO of a car company.
They’re basically a Volvo Group-owned EV brand that are trying to combine performance and sustainability with beauty and elegance, and I think they’re doing it quite well.
Even though they take their cues from Volvo’s engineers, they’ve still got their own personalised touches on their products; a sure sign for the future!
Waymo and Polestar
So Waymo will be lending Polestar its amazing, fully self-driving technology, called Waymo Driver (ah, so that’s what it is), making them an exclusive global level 4 partner for Volvo Car Group.
What’s level 4, you may ask? It’s a level of tech whereby cars can literally drive themselves in limited situations.
This is what Polestar say about it: “Through our strategic partnership, we will frist work together to integrate the Waymo Driver into an all-new mobility-focused electric-vehicle platform for ride-hailing services.” In other words Uber without a driver. Wait don’t they have that already?
At the moment, we really don’t know more about it. What we do know is that the partnership has enabled Polestar to save big time on hardware. For example, a 90 per cent reduction in the cost of its lidar systems.
Waymo also introduced a virtual testing environment a couple of years ago, with the geekiest name ever: CarCraft (named after WoW apparently), which is something else that would be interesting to Polestar’s engineers.
Polestar joins companies like Fiat Chrysler and JLR in Team Waymo. The future is definitely Waymo driverless EVs, and less gear-shifting drifting.
