[BoorishBears]

So they've stopped working on their own self-driving car from scratch, but they haven't stopped working on self-driving cars.

They just want to progress to semi-autonomous cars with a 3rd party instead of leapfrogging to fully autonomous built in-house, which makes sense.

The headline seemed a bit more ominous...

[baldfat]

I think the idea is that Alphabet will be spinning this department to become their own company. This means they need to have a product that they can sell and not have the bottomless well of funding they previously saw.

[brbrodude]

I was already imagining Google would be much more interested in dominating the algorithmic and software aspect of it than competing with their own car, since self-driving software will probably be winner-take-all, it's of course much better to license the tech for every other carmaker... I'd guess the car was just a 'vehicle' for the R&D all along.