Greed is another logical explanation. I don't buy the narrative of Levandowski as some tortured idealist who just wanted his dream to shit rainbows, and Google as the neglectful parent stifling his creative growth. If that was the case he would have stuck with Otto for more autonomy.
I think Google just understands the complexity of the issue presented by true self-driving cars. I'm still highly skeptical that they're going to become a thing outside of cities and major highways anytime soon, there are simply too many edge cases to cover. That's not to say it's impossible, but Google is clearly shooting for pure self-driving cars that don't need a steering wheel, or something close to that, prior to any commercial application. Tesla and Uber are taking more iterative approaches, but they can directly benefit from mediocre/incomplete self-driving in the meantime whereas there's no incentive for Google. We'll see who gets to the holy grail first, but I wouldn't discount Google. Large-scale, public, iterative approaches, while the dominant religion in modern tech, are not a panacea.
I think Google just understands the complexity of the issue presented by true self-driving cars. I'm still highly skeptical that they're going to become a thing outside of cities and major highways anytime soon, there are simply too many edge cases to cover. That's not to say it's impossible, but Google is clearly shooting for pure self-driving cars that don't need a steering wheel, or something close to that, prior to any commercial application. Tesla and Uber are taking more iterative approaches, but they can directly benefit from mediocre/incomplete self-driving in the meantime whereas there's no incentive for Google. We'll see who gets to the holy grail first, but I wouldn't discount Google. Large-scale, public, iterative approaches, while the dominant religion in modern tech, are not a panacea.