Autonomy by Lawrence D. Burns

Author:Lawrence D. Burns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Seeds of Change

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

—MIKE TYSON

The members of the Chauffeur team would recall that period of 2009 through 2010, when their all-encompassing focus was devoted to meeting the challenges set out for them by Page and Brin, as their honeymoon phase, when everyone cooperated on a single goal and everyone was getting along. The project was secret in those days, and sometimes Urmson and his team imagined how society would respond to the news of their invention. Using lasers and artificial intelligence, chutzpah and engineering know-how, they had built a car that could drive itself on public roads more safely than a human driver. They believed their invention would have a transformative effect on society.

Then the honeymoon ended. And it did so for a lot of different reasons. One was just human nature. We all do this—we look forward to an event with a collection of hopes, dreams and fears, and when the event actually happens, the reality doesn’t live up to our expectations. No one threw a ticker-tape parade for the engineers on the Chauffeur team to celebrate their achievements. The world did not greet the news that Google was developing a driverless car with rapturous applause. The money was nice. That made a big difference in their day-to-day lives. But money aside, very little changed after the team reached its milestones and John Markoff’s Times story was published.

The reception that Chris Urmson and Anthony Levandowski received in Detroit is illustrative of society’s response as a whole. Once they recovered from the party at Thrun’s house, the Chauffeur engineers began discussing with Thrun and the Google leadership how exactly they would commercialize the self-driving car. Most of the possibilities discussed involved working with an automobile manufacturer. So before they’d settled on any one project, Urmson and Levandowski flew to Detroit to talk to several of the major automotive companies, as a kind of investigative foray. “The idea was, if you’re going to make self-driving cars, you have to work with a car company,” Urmson recalls. “Maybe they’ll sell us cars to build a fleet. Maybe we’re going to be retrofitting our stuff onto their cars to sell. But you need to have some kind of a relationship with them to do it properly.”

The first meeting was with what’s known as a tier-one supplier—a company that provides parts to the brand-name automakers. These are located all over the world. The best known are Germany’s Robert Bosch GmbH, Japan’s Denso and Canada’s Magna International. Headquartered near Detroit are companies like Lear, Delphi and Visteon. The biggest of them have revenues in the billions, with just as many employees as the automakers they’re supplying—and headquarters that are just as impressive. At a boardroom in a Detroit suburb early in 2011, Urmson and Levandowski gave a presentation about the Chauffeur project, the cars’ capabilities, the number of miles they’d driven, the broad strokes of how the autonomous software saw the road. And at the end, they were greeted with complete and utter disinterest.

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