Google hires car industry veteran to lead self-driving car project

The search company announced on Sunday that John Krafcik, an auto industry veteran, would become chief executive of its self-driving car project this month. A Stanford-educated engineer who has spent the past four decades in various engineering and management positions at carmakers including Ford and Hyundai, Mr Krafcik will arrive at Google after serving as president of TrueCar, an auto pricing and information website.

The hiring of Mr. Krafcik puts the self-driving car project, which sits inside Google’s “Google X” research division, one step closer to graduating from an expensive engineering experiment to a real commercial undertaking that could drastically change how people commute.

“This is a great opportunity to help Google develop the enormous potential of self-driving cars,” Mr. Krafcik said in an emailed statement from Google. “This technology can save thousands of lives, give millions of people greater mobility and free us from a lot of the things we find frustrating about driving today. I can’t wait to get started.”

Google’s self-driving cars have logged more than one million miles on public roads. The search giant recently started testing a bubble-shaped prototype on the streets of its hometown of Mountain View, Calif. Another version of the car, a modified Lexus sports utility vehicle, started self-driving around Austin, Tex.

“We still have a lot to learn about how people perceive our vehicles and how they’ll want to fit this technology into their lives and their communities — and that’s why our vehicles are currently self-driving 10,000 miles a week in Mountain View and Austin, and why we’d like to run pilot programs with our prototypes at some point,” a Google representative wrote in an emailed statement.

Mr. Krafcik's hiring comes with Google in the middle of a vast reorganization into a new company called Alphabet, a move that will separate most of the company's core businesses — like its search engine and the YouTube video site — from more speculative projects like self-driving cars, biotech and balloons that beam Internet to rural areas.

In a news release on Sunday, Google said the self-driving cars would remain inside the X lab and not become a standalone company, though it left open the possibility it could stand alone eventually.

“This is about getting ourselves ready for the future, so we can bring this technology to its full potential,” the release said. “The project is not becoming an Alphabet company at this stage, though it’s certainly a good candidate to become one at some point in the future.”

- (The New York Times 2015)