12-19-2016, Business Insider -- Google announced it was spinning out its self-driving car unit into an independent company called Waymo on Tuesday.

The tech giant has been working on autonomous technology longer than anyone in the game. It first announced the project in 2009 under Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor lauded as the founder of the self-driving car.

The concept of building a robot car was so bizarre at the time it prompted Fiat Chrysler to launch a peculiar attack ad in 2011:

"Hands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company? We've seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy."

Well, times have changed. Now Fiat Chrysler supplies Pacifica minivans for Waymo. Major automakers like General Motors and Ford are also investing in self-driving cars.

But even though Google has been in the self-driving car space longer than anyone else out there — before it was even considered a legitimate space like it is today — it's getting lapped by the competition.

Google may know what it's doing when it comes to refining self-driving car technology, but it has been totally lost when it comes to bringing a product to market.

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