Waymo, Google’s sister company that deals with self-driving cars, is putting the term ‘self-driving’ on the willows. The fact that ‘fully autonomous’ fits better into the picture, according to the company, could just be because of Tesla.
Remarkable news from Silicon Valley. Waymo will continue what it has been doing for years, namely developing technology for self-driving cars. However, the news is exactly in the term, because Waymo will no longer talk about ‘self-driving’ from now on. The ‘self-driving’ (the news comes to us in English, of course) is being replaced by ‘fully autonomous driving technology’, or literally ‘fully autonomous driving technology’.
That may seem like an arbitrary linguistic intervention, but there is more to it. “Precision in language matters and can save lives,” says Waymo. According to the company, the term “fully self-driving” creates expectations that cannot be fulfilled as long as people are needed to oversee the operation of the company’s assistance systems. With this, the company is undoubtedly (also) referring to Tesla, which has been offering an option package for years under the heading ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD) that allows a Tesla to be slightly more independent, but still far from being able to pass through traffic independently. However, Waymo is also helping himself, underlining that the drivers who currently drive the company’s test cars make billions of decisions every day needed to complete the journey.
Waymo’s decision seems understandable, although we do wonder whether ‘fully autonomous’ is now so much better. It’s different, though.