Generally I would say that a company like Google is researching self-driving, while a company like Volvo is building self-driving cars. It's very likely that Google has the edge when it comes to something like autonomous taxis (i.e. pods), but that is still some years ahead and who knows how much of that will have been a relevant effort then. I guess they will have a lot of patents though.
Android demonstrates Google is happy to have someone else build the physical hardware. The current auto industry is predicated on many independent suppliers and Google could easily become yet another one.
Yes, but the technology they are researching (full autonomous) is still further down the road than something like highway autonomy only. Which would still give you most of the benefits of an autonomous car in boredom, accident and unproductive time reduction. While not requiring as expensive parts and as much research.
If you do a self-driving pod then it's another story because then you share the cost between passengers and you can engineer it to only go city speeds for instance.
What I'm essentially saying is that at the point Googles research becomes "a reality" the car becomes the weak part of the equation. When we have full autonomy, I might almost just take a train (that will probably always be much faster than cars because of physics) and catch another autonomous pod at the other station. This is of course what could/should happen in theory, not what will happen.
A Smart car is already fairly close to the pod concept in terms of form factor. Google Pods biggest difference is moving the seats further back. IMO, if Google get's the software down most company's could put out a self driving car within 1 or 2 model years. However, people are going to take much longer before people are going to take much longer before buying cars that can't be driven.
