Honda Will Get Google-Developed Tech For Autonomous Car With Waymo Partnership

At this point, some of our readers are probably wondering what Waymo is, so we will do a quick recap so that everybody is on the same page. The idea with Waymo is that it is an independent company of Alphabet Inc., and it makes self-driving technology. In turn, Alphabet Inc. is an independent company that was started by Google.

Waymo currently uses the vehicles that were first showcased by Google as its self-driving cars, but the technology is the same. The main difference is that the name behind the product has been changed, but that has not affected the result in any way.

With the link between Waymo, Alphabet, and Google clarified as best as we could imagine, let’s talk about Honda’s latest deal with them. The press release published by the Japanese brand refers to the start of formal discussions, which is a fancy term for both parties admitting that their engineers are talking about working together, and that a contract has probably been formulated by now.

Honda wants to know more about Waymo’s fully autonomous cars (who doesn’t, right?), and they are curious as to how they could integrate that technology into their models. The technology integration part refers to software, self-driving sensors, software, and computing platform.

In other words, Honda wants to know how complicated and how expensive it will be for them to make self-driving cars with self-driving car tech developed by Waymo.

If the engineers of both parties get along, and the corresponding managers have an agreement on their hands, Honda will enter a formal agreement with Waymo, which will lead to driverless cars from this automaker that features technology that was initially developed by Google. The engineering teams of both parties will work in Silicon Valley, Mountain View, Novi (Michigan), and Tochigi (Japan).