Google recently added a new head for its autonomous driving initiative and the Mountain View-based tech giant didn’t have to go far to find its new man—it poached him from Airbnb, located just up the road in San Francisco.
The move by Google is the latest, and possibly the best, example of the sea change in the automotive industry. Airbnb is one of the earliest success stories of the so-called “sharing economy,” which is by some odd twist of fate a space that many automakers want to occupy, particularly with their early autonomous offerings.
If recent announcements by Ford, Uber and General Motors/Lyft are any indication, Google’s autonomous software will likely land in a ride-hailing fleet rather than a consumer-grade vehicle. So, like Airbnb, Google won’t be marketing an actual product for sale so much as a reliable service to be used in a fleeting fashion. More on this subject later.
