5 things we learned from Waymo’s big self-driving car report

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Waymo just dropped a 43-page white paper called the Waymo Safety Report that provides a wealth of new details about Waymo's vision for the self-driving car product the company is getting ready to launch.

Officially, the document is a regulatory filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has encouraged-but not yet required-the makers of self-driving cars to file a report describing how they expect to deal with a variety of safety issues. But the document is also another part of the public education campaign the company has been running to convince Americans of the benefits of its technology.

It's fundamentally a marketing document rather than a technical one, so it leaves a lot of unanswered questions about exactly how Waymo's technology will work. Still, it provides a lot of new information-and publicly confirms a lot of rumors and educated guesswork-about how Waymo envisions the self-driving car product that Waymo could launch as soon as this year.

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