What makes you think it won't be their last? Google frequently puts their toes in the water and then decides it's too cold to swim. It's like, their modus operandi.
Does it really make sense that Google would build self-driving cars without also thinking about ride sharing technology and userbase? I think the primary use case of Google's cars will be optimal ride sharing, doesn't everyone think this as well?
Sure, their MO is to try things out and ditch the ones that don't work - and this one may not work. But if it doesn't, I'd bet that they'd try again. There's a perfect fit between self-driving technology and ride sharing (hence Uber's interest in self-driving cars).
What will be cool is once they are self driving, they will be able to auto calculate quickest routes to pick people up, drop off, etc while being able to re-calculate to pick up people along the way.
I'd trust software to drive me to my destination safely and responsibly much more than I would trust random strangers, or even myself for that matter.
In any case this is dissimilar to most google projects because it looks like it's mostly under Waze's control which atm has a lot of autonomy, it's likely being called a google project by the Waze team because of the brand recognition and by reporters because it's more interesting to talk about how google might be putting itself in a precarious legal position (vis-a-vis a conflict of interest), instead of saying Waze created yet another ridesharing app.
> There's a perfect fit between self-driving technology and ride sharing
In Google's case, that would be continuous advertisement inundation to the product(s)[1] as well as even more data collection on the product[1].
1 - product: previously known as "a user[2]".
2 - user: archaic form of the term "person".
But only after a ton of people have started to use it, and weren't warned that Google was "toe-ing the water": health, reader, code(!), I'm certain there are others ...
