Google prepares for manufacturing of driverless car

Google continues to push for the introduction of their self-driving cars on public roads. After positive statements by NHTSA and overtures from the United Kingdom and Isle of Man to test their cars there, job postings show that Google aims to significantly grow their self-driving car team. The 36 job descriptions below show that Google expands activities on all aspects of their self-driving car, including manufacturing, global sourcing, automotive noise and vibration, electrical engineering etc. It remains unlikely that Google intends to manufacture their cars themselves but the job postings complete the picture that Google wants to build a manufacturing-ready reference design of a fully self-driving car which they can either use for having their cars manufactured by a supplier or which can inform licensing and cooperation discussion with OEMs from the auto industry.

The job postings below were obtained from the Google job search engine on 2016-02-13 with a reusable query. All 36 jobs are for the Self-Driving Car team at Google-X:

  1. Mechanical Global Supply Chain Manager
  2. Mechanical Manufacturing Development Engineer
  3. Manufacturing Process Engineer
  4. Manufacturing Supplier Quality Engineer
  5. PCBA and Final Assembly Global Supply Manager
  6. Automotive NVH (Noise, Vibration, Harshnees), Lead
  7. Manufacturing Test Engineer
  8. Reliability Engineer, Vehicle Test Lead
  9. Reliability Engineer
  10. Product Manager, Vehicle 
  11. Global Commmodity Manager
  12. Industrial Designer
  13. Marketing Manager
  14. Technical Program Manager, Vehicle Safety
  15. Operations Program Manager
  16. Policy Analyst
  17. Head of Real Estate and Workplace Services
  18. Product Manager, Robotics
  19. User Experience Researcher
  20. Mechatronics Engineer
  21. Electrical Engineer
  22. Mechanical Engineer, Lead
  23. Systems Engineer, Motion Control
  24. Systems Engineer, Compute and Display
  25. Reliability Engineer, Lead
  26. Vehicle Systems Engineer
  27. Perception Sensing Systems Engineer
  28. Embedded Software Engineer
  29. Electrical Validation Engineer
  30. Systems Engineer
  31. Radio-Frequency Test Engineer
  32. Researcher/ Robotics Software Engineer
  33. Radio Frequency/High Speed Digital Hardward Design Engineer
  34. Camera Hardware Engineer
  35. Mechanical Engineer, Laser
  36. HMI Displays Hardware Engineering Lead