’A fascinating hybrid. Part freewheeling history of the rise of the modern autonomous vehicle, part intimate memoir from an insider who was on the front lines for much of that history, Autonomy will more than bring readers up to speed on one of today’s most closely watched technologies’ Brian Merchant, author of The One DeviceFrom the ultimate insider – a former General Motors executive and current advisor to the Google Self-Driving Car project – comes the definitive story of the race between Google, Tesla and Uber to create the driverless car.We stand on the brink of a technological revolution. In the near future, most of us will not own automobiles, but will travel instead in driverless electric vehicles summoned at the touch of an app. We will be liberated from driving, so that the time we spend in cars can be put to more productive use. We will prevent more than 90 percent of car crashes, provide freedom of mobility to the elderly and disabled and decrease our dependence on fossil fuels.Autonomy tells the story of the maverick engineers and computer experts who triggered the revolution. Lawrence Burns – long-time adviser to the Google self-driving car project (now Waymo) and former corporate vice president of research, development and planning at General Motors – provides the perfectly timed history of how we arrived at this point, in a character-driven and vivid account of the unlikely thinkers who accomplished what billion-dollar automakers never dared.Beginning at a 2004 off-road robot race across the Mojave Desert with a million-dollar purse and continuing up to the current stampede to develop driverless technology, Autonomy is a page-turning chronicle of the past, a diagnosis of the present and a prediction of the future – the ultimate guide to understanding the driverless car and to navigating the revolution it has sparked.
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Lawrence Burns. Autonomy
Copyright
Praise for Autonomy
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction. THE PROBLEM WITH CARS
Chapter One. DARPA’S GRAND CHALLENGE
Chapter Two. A SECOND CHANCE
Chapter Three. HISTORY HAPPENS IN VICTORVILLE
Chapter Four. A FISH OUT OF WATER
Chapter Five. EPIPHANIES
Chapter Six. CLOSE ONLY COUNTS IN HORSESHOES
Chapter Seven. THE 101,000-MILE CHALLENGE
Chapter Eight. THE SEEDS OF CHANGE
Chapter Nine. THE $4 TRILLION DISRUPTION
Chapter Ten. THE STAMPEDE
Chapter Eleven. DRIVING OPPORTUNITY
Chapter Twelve. HUMAN FACTORS
Epilogue. THE QUEST GOES ON
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON SOURCES
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EPILOGUE
INDEX
About the Author
About the Publisher
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‘If you want a glimpse of how the future is being engineered today, there is no better book’
JEFFREY SACHS, author of The End of Poverty
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The venue would host Urmson and the members of his team pretty much nonstop through that Thanksgiving weekend. By the end of it, enough computers were wired together, and enough sensors mounted, that Sandstorm felt like it was coming alive. It was around this period that the team found the perfect place to test their Frankenstein’s monster. There weren’t many spots with convenient access to the CMU campus where a 5,000-pound, exhaust-snorting, diesel-gulping, oil-dripping robot could push the limits of its abilities without risking civilian fatalities. It was Mickey Struthers, the postman volunteer, who thought of the solution. One day while he was driving over Pittsburgh’s Hot Metal Bridge on the way to Carnegie Mellon, Mickey noticed the lights along the shores of the Monongahela River twinkling in the cool evening air. All except for a vast swathe of dark shoreline to the right of the bridge. Mickey knew that was industrial land that had once housed Pittsburgh’s last steel mill, the LTV Coke Works, which had closed in 1998. Since then the land had sat fallow.
Struthers suggested the site to Whittaker, who loved the idea for both its convenience as well as its industrial heritage. The 168-acre land parcel housed a railroad roundhouse and numerous outbuildings and equipment that made it seem as though it was left over from the industrial revolution, connecting the team to the same brawny spirit that had built Pittsburgh so many decades ago. With a few phone calls to the wealthy family foundations that owned the land, Whittaker arranged for the team to test there.
