John Krafcik, the CEO of Alphabet’s self-driving car company, Waymo, explained to the Financial Times (paywall) that its vehicles only occasionally connect to the Internet.
Self-driving cars are essentially large computers on wheels. No surprise, then, that some of them will be kept offline in the name of security.
Waymo is able to take its cars offline because its crucial systems are all stored on local computers aboard the car. And since those systems are performing the same job as a human driver—that is, taking in information about the roadway and making decisions about how to behave—there’s no need for it to pull data down from the cloud at every turn.
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