
Google has reached out to an auto manufacturer for the first time for a collaboration on autonomous vehicles. The Self-Driving Car Project and Fiat Chrysler will work together to convert about 100 2017 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrids into fully autonomous cars.
In a blog post, Google details how they chose the minivan because Fiat Chrysler could make them easily adaptable to the self-driving software. Additionally, the large interior and hands-free doors make it easy for passengers and workers to get in and out. Google says that both teams will work “in the coming months” to make a truly autonomous vehicle. They hope to have them on the road by the end of 2016. Although most of their testing is done near their campus in Mountain View, Calif., Google has also tested its cars on the road in Austin, Kirkland, Wash., and Phoenix.
The addition of 100 minivans will about double the fleet of autonomous cars Google already has at its disposal. Creating “a fully self-driving car that can take you from A to B with the touch of a button” will require tweaks to Google’s existing lane-keeping and computer vision capabilities, but this is a big step toward maybe taking a different tack when it comes to consumer self-driving vehicles. Google’s small self-driving car looks like a futuristic pod, but doesn’t come in a form factor that would be practical for a family in the same way as the minivan.
Google hasn’t detailed how long the collaboration will last, or any financial information.
Meanwhile, companies like Tesla are refining their own autonomous cars to a greater or lesser degree. General Motors and Apple are both angling to add autonomous vehicle researchers to their workforce. Some Tesla owners are getting creative with the short-range self-driving Summon feature: