Google Made A Brilliant Pivot To Turn Around Its Self-driving-car Struggles

Waymo It's not a secret that Google has ambitions to become a hardware company. The tech giant unveiled a suite of new hardware products in the fall, like its first smartphone, the Google Pixel, and connected speaker, the Google Home. And now the company is taking the same approach with self-driving cars. Waymo, the self-driving-car company run under Google's parent company Alphabet, announced this week that it will manufacture an entire suite of sensors in-house. That means all the sensors that self-driving cars rely on — radar, lidar, cameras — are all being designed and manufactured at Google where they will be integrated to work together as an entire self-driving-hardware suite. In many ways, it's a brilliant move by Waymo to reclaim its position as a leader in the self-driving-car space, though some questions remain. The long road to market WaymoThere's never really been a question whether Waymo was a competitor when it came to self-driving-car software.