Volvo does this for living. It's their main product.
For Amazon and Alphabet this is just about reaching a new market before the other guy. Things will be rushed, and they will move fast and break more things. I don't want to ride the car that was created by first-to-market.
But how do you envision that Alphabet is going to leverage being "first-to-market" in this case?
I'm expecting that people in general are more concerned about other aspects of their cars, than the self-driving aspect (as long as it's there), just like people don't care much about what kind of GPS is built-in for a certain car brand. So I'm not sure that Alphabet would try to rush things.
Why do you feel this is safer? Although Volvo labeled its autonomous vehicle endeavors “Intellisafe,” with the goal of making Volvo cars “deathless” when the company fully rolls them out, WayMo has over 3 million driven and is the most maturw automonous platform.
Perhaps Volvo vehicles are the safest in the event of an accident, but the major benefit of a self deiving car is avoiding accidents altogether
I worked in the industry and I feel the same. For existing car companies the question is if they have somebody with enough power to shift the resources in the right direction. For newer companies they are already heading in the right direction but if they treat this as just software, move fast and break things, we will release a patch etc. then they are more likely to turn the users against self-driving cars.
