Google announced that former Hyundai president and chief executive John Krafcik will be leading the Internet giant’s self-driving car project from the end of September. The company, which recently announced it is breaking itself up under new parent company Alphabet, also hinted that the self-driving car unit is “a good candidate” to eventually be spun out.
For now, though, the project will remain under the Google X research division. In June, the company said that its driverless cars had autonomously driven over one million miles, and at the end of June that it started road tests of its prototypes. The decision to hire Krafcik seems partly to do with his ideas around commercializing the technology, evolving it from more than just a super-cool but experimental project into a fully fledged and viable business.