There is one tiny little mention of Waymo in there but that's clearly the main push for Google in robotics now, and if that's where those robotics aquihires went maybe that's what they wanted.
Why? Well, when I leave work, I spend 45 minutes in the car, and another 45 minutes preparing dinner. With self driving cars, that will not change. But with self cooking chefs, that would add 45 minutes of quality time to my day.
The difference is that a self driving taxi will be far cheaper than a taxi, partly because it can be shared.
A robot that prepared food already exists, it's called a factory, but food is far more variable in terms of people's desires.
The economic impact of car accidents is almost as staggering as the numbers of injuries and lives lost. The total economic impact of car crashes is a whopping $871 billion in the U.S. (http://www.thedrive.com/sheetmetal/13792/car-accidents-cause...)
The revenue of the entire restaurant industry is less than that total economic impact ($799 billion http://www.restaurant.org/News-Research/Research/Facts-at-a-...)
The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Note that these numbers are made up to a certain degree, much more so than the restaurant industry numbers, and so they are not necessarily comparable. The NHTSA puts the value of one life at $8.86 million (in 2010 dollars) [p. 114 of the report]. For 40,000 deaths, that's already $354 billion. They then add other costs, too, which are also hard or impossible to measure.
I know this is a normal thing that normal people do; I know people who do it, but it is something I personally find incomprehensibly difficult.
Truck driver is, IIRC, the largest single job description in the US. That's a huge target market for self-driving technology and a massive societal problem that's looking when so many people are left jobless.
It makes more sense for the dinner cooking robot to be making thousands of meals a day than just two for you each day.
We are building a network of automated food preparation and retail service locations for high density mainland Chinese cities, with a view toward international expansion.
Your statement concurs with the results of a study published in PNAS and reported in NYT recently regarding cross-demographic improvements in happiness resulting from increased spending on time-saving - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/18/1706541114.full and https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/science/study-happy-save-...
Even in the cost of buying the vehicle, it is already highly automated, how much can more robots decrease the price of the car?
Robotics in general may not have strong barriers.
Transformers are cars that drive themselves.
I think it's a case that will be reinforced with the first viable self driven car.