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.

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".