We'll eventually get around to working on a more sophisticated way of handling duplicate submissions, but the simplicity of the current approach (i.e. allow a few reposts if a story hasn't had significant attention yet) has much to commend it.
They just want to progress to semi-autonomous cars with a 3rd party instead of leapfrogging to fully autonomous built in-house, which makes sense.
The headline seemed a bit more ominous...
But making, marketing and distributing 10's of thousands of cars is so outside the scope of anything that Google is good at ...
Cars are crazy regulated, massive supply chains, complex distribution networks, massive finance issues both in terms of production but also consumer financing, massive labour issues, massive and long term capex in plants and equipment ... it's just not Googley.
I suggest that it's probably the right thing for them to do.
I always search before submitting, and just upvote an existing story if someone has already submitted it (unless it's a from different source, which may get more traction due to being better written).