Autonowashing and Waymo’s approach to fully autonomous vehicles
Waymo is a self-driving car company, but they don’t particularly like using that terminology. Instead they prefer fully autonomous as a more accurate way to describe driverless or autonomous driving technology. What consumers may not fully understand is the difference between self-driving and fully autonomous. A self-driving car is a type of vehicle that can provide some level of automation like ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) or automatic cruise control. It still requires driver attention for proper operation or it can lead to accidents. A fully autonomous driving mode does not require driver attention and provides full automation without driver intervention. It seems Waymo is making that distinction to educate consumers. While self-driving cars can also be fully autonomous, by default self-driving cars are not fully autonomous.