A recent report from Yahoo Autos suggest that, while Google has been experimenting with its own autonomous vehicle system for years now, it only recently revealed plans last month to begin testing on public streets in California. The tech giant has currently logged 1.3 million miles in autonomous driving and has 53 test vehicles on the roads in California and Texas.

By pairing its resources with Ford, the tech giant strategically avoids spending the billions of dollars required to build its own automotive manufacturing facilities and hiring engineers, allowing more resources to be put into an already successful automotive company’s business line and potentially avoiding billions of dollars in overhead costs.

"A lot of people out there do a really good job making cars," Chris Urmson, Google's director of self-driving car research, once told me. "They've been doing it for 100 and something years.  They're very good at it. They've got a lot of experience. Yeah, it's not obvious to me that Google making cars is the right answer."

The report notes that the deal isn’t exclusive to just Ford, but being Google’s first autonomous vehicle partner puts the company at the forefront of a potentially enormous developing market depending on economic conditions in the years ahead.

"It's a long-term play,” says Alan Hall, Technology, Research and Innovation Communications Manager at Ford. Manufacturing cars has been a great business for 111 years, but manufacturing cars, and Bill Ford has said this, is not necessarily going to be our entire business for the next 100 years. That was the way we delivered mobility solutions for the first 100 years—what are the mobility solutions going to be for the next 100 years? It's easily going to be a mix."