Google hires Airbnb executive Shaun Stewart
Q. Which Airbnb executive has been hired to head Alphabet Inc’s Google Self Driving Car Project on 26th August 2016?- Published on 29 Aug 16a. Shaun Stewart
b. Michael Stewart
c. George Stewart
d. Neil Stewart
ANSWER: Shaun Stewart
Alphabet Inc’s Google self driving car project has hired top executive from online vacation home rental marketplace Shaun Stewart.
- He will be joining Google as director of the self driving car project
- His role will be to commercialise Google’s self driving technology that has been developing more than 7 years and has seen an increased pace of activity over the past 12 months
- Stewart’s hiring follows the departure of Chief Technical Office of the project, Chris Urmson
- Urmson was the project’s team leader and chief public spokesman until former Hyundai executive John Karfcik was hired by Google as the CEO of the project in 2015
- Urmson was the Google self driving car architect and he had predicated Google’s self driving technology would be ready for production by 2020 and indicates Google was actively seeking partners among global automakers.
- Stewart is an experienced technology executive specialising in building and scaling businesses
- He joined Google from Airbnb which was set up as a vacation rental business of the company
- He was earlier CEO of Jetsetter, a company acquired by TripAdvisor
- Recent hires for the project also include Kevin Vosen, project’s first general counsel and Tim Panandreou, former San Francisco city official and expert in transportation policy.
- Over the past 12 months, Google has expanded to 4 cities
- It has also signed a collaboration agreement with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to double the fleet of autonomous vehicles
- The search engine major has also opened an engineering tech centre in Michigan
- Google current has almost 60 test vehicles on the road and has driven 1.8 million miles autonomously
