My biggest surprise was that they didn't remove the steering wheel entirely and let people sit at the front. That steering wheel moving on its own made me very uncomfortable.
Longer term this is a problem for Waymo. Their supposed partnership with Fiat Chrysler isn't a full-blown, intergrated manufacturing partnership. Waymo is mostly just buying Pacifica mini-vans from FCA and retrofitting them with Waymo's own custom designed hardware at a separate facility in Nova Michigan.
This is not cost effective, and not viable as a long-term strategy. If Waymo does have a strategy for producing robotaxis in the tens of thousands, they've been very quiet about it.
With every year that goes by building an autonomous OS gets easier. Best practices have been established, knowledge continually disseminates throughout the industry, there is, every year less software and hardware that needs to be built from scratch. Automobile mass production, on the other hand, isn't getting any easier. It's as hard as it ever was. So really, over the long run, it's the legacy automakers who have the true competitive moat, and the real bargaining power.
Did… the… what? They didn't actually try that did they? Did nobody tell them auto exec have been fucking over their supply chains for a century?
On the other side, Continental, the huge European auto parts maker, is quietly starting to make all the parts for self-driving cars. They bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, the good flash LIDAR company, and are preparing that technology from volume production. They make the sensors, actuators, ruggedized computers, dashboards, etc.[1] Delco is also active in automatic driving. Self-driving may just be an auto accessory.
[1] https://www.continental-corporation.com/en/products-and-inno...
Krafcik's first order of business was to hammer out a deal with Ford, and by that time Waymo had ceded on many of their initial terms, as they were starting to get nervous, because it does take a good 5-7 years to design a vehicle and tool up a production line, and time is of the essence.
Apparently Ford wanted significant capital investments from Alphabet as part of the deal, and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said 'no' to that, so the deal fell through and Ford's then CEO Mark Fields was (eventually) fired and replaced by Jim Hackett as a result.
The other thing that happened around the same time was a talent exodus from Waymo. Ford hired ex-Google self driving car project program manager Brian Salesky to lead the formation of Argo.ai, Ford's own robotaxi subsidiary, and Argo seems to be coming along but it's too early to gauge how well they're really doing.
I can understand GM wanting nothing to do with waymo, they've actually got some promising autonomous tech. But FCA should be jumping at the chance to work with waymo, unless they've got some top secret autonomous research happening that's a lot further along than anybody could guess.
That makes no sense when they're not required to have a driver with their ass in the seat, are the elderly passengers from 00:33 going to unbuckle and jump over the front seat to take over driving?
A system like that could work where the steering wheel doesn't respond to the user when self-driving but is enabled when needed. Prevents accidental steering.