Google has announced its self-driving car company, christened Waymo. According to Google, Waymo stands for 'a new way forward in mobility'. But the company has not popped out of nowhere and this is just a renaming of the tech behemoth's self-driving division, formerly called the Google self-driving car project. Like Google, Waymo comes under the umbrella of the multinational tech conglomerate, Alphabet Inc. For the uninitiated, Alphabet Inc. was founded last year by the founders of Google and it is the parent company of the same.

 

Google has been testing its self-driving car since 2009 and its prototypes have spent the equivalent of 300 years of driving time on the road. Google highlighted in an official release that tired, drunk or distracted driving is a leading cause for the 1.2 million lives lost on roads every year and that its endeavour as a carmaker will be to ensure better and safer motoring. Since the cars will be driverless, chances are that occupants in the new car will not require any kind of licence to move around in it. This will turn out to be a boon for a lot of people, especially the elderly. For example, Google completed the world's first fully self-driven car ride on October 20, 2015, and its passenger was a blind man.