Building the best possible driver inside Waymo's Castle

Waymo has been very protective of its testing process in past, but recently it started opening up – likely as a bid to help get the public more comfortable with self-driving vehicle technology as it moves towards broad deployment of its autonomous cars. As part of that, the former Google self-driving car project asked a group of journalists to pay a visit to its Castle testing facility in Northern California. The Castle isn't just a very cool name for a proving ground, it's the actual name of the former air force base (used during the 1940s for training bombers for WWII) that Google took over back in 2013 to house some of its'X' projects, including Project Loon and what would eventually become Waymo in 2016. At Castle, we got a rare look at one aspect of Waymo's testing process for its autonomous cars, complete with a briefing on the company's approach from CEO John Krafcik, VP of Engineering Dimitry Dolgov, UX and Early Rider Program Product Manager Juliet Rothenberg and Head of UX Design Ryan Powell. Krafcik opened by giving a rundown of the various terms that have been applied to self-driving technology, ranging from "driver assistance" to "semi-driverless cars," noting that there's been "a lot of confusion about what the terminology means."