Waymo, the self-driving-car company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has unveiled its latest vehicle: a Fiat Chrysler minivan.
In a blog post published late Sunday, CEO John Krafcik revealed the first photos of the vehicle, which the company has been working on with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles since May 2016.
The minivan is a modified Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. Waymo has a 100-strong fleet of them, which it will be testing on public roads in 2017.
The news comes shortly after Waymo announced that it was being spun out from Alphabet’s experimental X lab into a full-fledged Alphabet company, with its own CEO and a new name.
Keep scrolling for more photos and info about the vehicles ...
Waymo's graduation from X came after it scaled back some of its loftier ambitions. The early vision was to build automobiles as well as software — but that has been dialed back to focus on creating self-driving features for other vehicles.
The company is being headed up by chief exec John Krafcik, who came on board in 2015 after working for Hyundai.
Source: Recode
The new minivans will be tested on public roads in areas where Waymo has already been trialling its self-driving tech, like Austin, Texas and Metro Phoenix, Arizona.
"As we get fully self-driving cars ready for the road, we’ll need more types of vehicles to refine and test our advanced driving software," Krafcik wrote. "With this great new minivan on the road in our test markets, we’ll learn how people of all ages, shapes, and group sizes experience our fully self-driving technology."
