With seemingly more and more automakers jumping into autonomous car development, Google is ramping up its efforts for its self-driving project.
According to Autoblog.com, the world's most valuable listed company is on a hiring spree in its autonomous division in an attempt to move the project along that much quicker.
As of Sunday, the blog reported that Google has listed 36 job openings under its Google X project. The positions range in fields from manufacturing to engineering in regard to developing systems, including sensors, robotics and motion control.
In particular, there are spots open for mechanical roles, safety of vehicles and reliability engineers. Other open positions within Google's autonomous space include those for real estate, services and marketing. The real estate-related position might be in reference to the company finding more locations — other than Texas and California — to test its self-driving cars.
"The self-driving car project aims to improve people's lives by transforming mobility and making it easier and safer for everyone to get around, regardless of their ability to drive," the intro to the 36 job listings reads on Google's site. "So far, we've self-driven over one million miles and are currently out on the streets of Mountain View, California, and Austin, Texas."
Although automakers such as Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and Ford — to only name a few — are working on their own self-driving vehicles, Google might be the most-intriguing company to be in autonomous development, considering its brand is synonymous with its search engine and not cars.
It will be intriguing to see if Google and other brands involved in self-driving car development could deliver a fully-autonomous vehicle by the targeted 2020 date.
At the Consumer Electronics Show 2016 last month in Las Vegas, Toyota and Mercedes each seemed to be skeptical about companies delivering fully autonomous cars in four years, saying that it will likely take longer than that.
"I am skeptical that we will be done with both in four years," Toyota Research Institute (TRI) CEO and executive technical adviser Dr. Gill Pratt told Tech Times amongst a pool of reporters at the time. "That's a very short time and we have a long way to go [with the full development of autonomous cars]. And again, just because we are 90, 95 percent of the way there doesn't mean if you've been climbing a mountain and you've been walking through the foothills - and that's 95 percent of the miles you have to go - that the last five percent when you have to climb up to the peak ... that's the hard part. It's going to take us a lot longer to get up the rest of the way of the peak than it has been the easy part."
