Krafcik is now the president of TrueCar, an eCommerce site for automobiles. After working at the GM-Toyota venture, he went to Ford Motor Co., where he held engineering posts including chief engineer on the Ford Expedition and Lincoln Navigator large SUVs.

Above: John Krafcik will use his automotive industry knowledge to push Google’s autonomous driving technology to the next level.

According to him, our current frustrations in driving will be solved with the ease of Google’s self-driving system.

Krafcik is a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who also has a business degree.

The incoming CEO made his name early on in his career when, in a 1988 research paper for MIT’s Sloan Management Review, he coined the term “lean production” to explain why Japanese automakers had become more productive than their Western rivals.

Google is deadly serious about driverless cars, and the web giant has just hired a veteran of the motor industry to head up its work in the field. Instead, they will team up with the world’s top manufacturing companies to bring the newest technology in the market safely.

As of the moment, the self-driving cars project remains in Google’s X labs but in the future, there is a big chance that it could be spun off into Alphabet, Google’s new holding company. The company’s statement says the project isn’t ready to become a separate company yet, “though it’s certainly a good candidate to become one at some point in the future”.

The Mountain View, California, company has been testing several dozen self-driving cars near its Silicon Valley headquarters, and more recently in Austin, Texas.

Hiring Krafcik in the project, Google secures its access in product development and global connections. And with traffic deaths ticking upward for the first time in decades, likely due to increasing driver distraction, Google’s goal cutting the more than 30,000 vehicle-related fatalities each year gives it a sense of social mission that could put the auto industry back on its heels.