Autonomy. Lawrence Burns
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disruption will transform the way we live, the way we get around and the way we do business. It will virtually eliminate automobile crashes, radically decreasing the number of deaths they cause every year. It will decrease the cost of long-haul trucking by about 50 percent—a remarkable productivity-improvement opportunity and amplifier of e-commerce growth, and a profoundly upsetting prospect for the millions of employees and small-business owners who earn their living as drivers. The financial implications are compelling for the auto manufacturers, who will transition their business models from selling millions of vehicles to millions of different customers and instead operate massive fleets of self-driving taxis in population centers around the world. Today, the average net income per vehicle sold by most auto companies ranges from $1,000 to $5,000. In contrast, a transportation service vehicle with, for example, a 300,000-mile wear cycle earning just $0.10 per mile makes a lifetime profit of $30,000. (The 300,000-mile figure is based on the approximate lifetime of taxicabs with internal combustion and hybrid electric engines.)
This book is the story of the loosely connected visionaries who saw something was possible before others, how their visions have come to be and how this future will reshape our world. For their optimism, these few spent years being disparaged as futurists, as impractical dreamers, as kids playing in a sandbox—until suddenly, in the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016, the industry recognized that the future the visionaries described wasn’t just possible. It was practical and desirable, and coming sooner than anyone might have ever thought.
How these men and women pulled off that transition is a remarkable story—one filled with complex alliances and betrayals. It includes miracles of engineering and accidents of mechanics. Remarkable feats of software programming and quite a few questionable acts. Great sacrifice is made, as well as, eventually, wealth. There are heroes and villains, and a lot of characters residing somewhere in between.
The tale could feature many beginnings. You could say that it began at the 1939 World’s Fair, where the General Motors pavilion provided a prescient version of a world much like the one we’re approaching. I hope at least part of it began when I became head of GM’s research and development, and CEO Rick Wagoner challenged me to reinvent the automobile. You could set the start of the sharing chapter near Boston, where Robin Chase cofounded Zipcar. The electric vehicle aspect started in Palo Alto, California, where Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, fresh off successfully selling one start-up, decided the new lithium-ion batteries deserved a shot in an automobile—and brought in an investor named Elon Musk.
But ultimately it was the autonomous end of this disruptive trinity that kick-started the transformation. Maybe that started coming true with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which in turn triggered a series of wars that spurred an obscure arm of the U.S. government, DARPA, to organize the challenges that ultimately set these dominoes in motion. But I’m not going to start this story at DARPA’s home in Arlington County, Virginia. Rather, I’ll start with the engineering student who probably sacrificed the most out of everyone—and who, going on fifteen years later, may turn out to be one of the ones who have gained the most, as well.
This story is going to start with Chris Urmson.
An engineer is someone who likes to work with numbers but doesn’t have the personality to be an accountant.
—UNKNOWN
Over the last fifteen years of development on autonomous vehicles, if there is one figure who has been there, on the ground, getting his palms filthy with engine grease, breathing carbon monoxide exhaust and burning himself with electronic solder to solve each little problem as it comes up, it is Chris Urmson. The technical lead of the Carnegie Mellon University teams that competed in the three robot-car challenges staged by DARPA, Urmson’s also the figure anointed as leader by the founder of Google’s Chauffeur self-driving car project, Sebastian Thrun. In fact, Urmson ran day-to-day operations on the team from its founding in 2009 to shortly before the spinning out of Chauffeur from Alphabet into a stand-alone company, known as Waymo, in 2016. Finally, Urmson also played a key role in the power struggle that dominated Chauffeur for long periods of its existence.
To make this thing work, Urmson has sweated blood.
He’d be the first to admit he doesn’t have the outright incandescent charisma of some of the other figures in this story. Urmson is smart, sure. He refined his willingness to consider every possible solution to a problem, no matter how outlandish, in the creative-thinking challenges that dominated the Canadian educational system’s classes for gifted learners. What Urmson lacks is the bumblebee attention span of some of his self-driving colleagues. Perhaps this is because of the milieu in which he was raised. The oldest son of a prison warden and his nurse wife, Urmson grew up in small Canadian cities—Trenton, in eastern Ontario, where the biggest employer is a military base. Victoria, the seat of the British Columbia provincial government. The not-exactly-bustling metropolis of Winnipeg, Manitoba. His dad was rising through the ranks of the northern nation’s correctional services bureaucracy, eventually running not just one prison, but a whole area of them, until the family settled in the sleepiest city of them all—Saskatoon, the capital of Saskatchewan, the least assuming province in one of the least assuming countries of the world.
Urmson grew up among people who viewed with suspicion those who drew attention to themselves. What the guy is, is solid. Straight-shooting. Steady. Urmson is not the guy you’re going to notice first when you walk into a room. But you spend enough time with the people in that room, and I don’t care who is in there, after a while Urmson will be the guy you trust to lead—to carry out the plan.
And in April 2003, Chris Urmson had a plan. In fact, Urmson thought he had the next couple of years of his life pretty well figured out as he drove from the remote Chilean city of Iquique to the great salt plains of the Atacama Desert. The road from Iquique into the Atacama would make anyone nervous. It zigs and zags from the Pacific Ocean on up a near-vertical shelf. Those who remember plate tectonics from high school geology might recall that this is where the Pacific’s Nazca Plate collides with South America, pushing the continent into the air, creating a ridge thousands of feet high and a rain shadow that runs six hundred miles up and down the Chilean coast. That rain shadow is the Atacama. One of Earth’s most forbidding landscapes, the driest nonpolar desert on the planet, an area so desolate that scientists use it as a stand-in for Mars. That was what Urmson was doing there. He was one of a handful of roboticists joining a team of NASA staff members to test a robot designed to crawl across the Martian landscape to seek out signs of life.
At twenty-seven, Urmson was tall and athletically built, with sandy blond hair and smiling blue eyes behind round, wire-framed spectacles. He tended to jam a baseball hat so low over his brow that the brim would touch the top of his glasses. Urmson planned to spend about a month in the Atacama. Then he’d return to Pittsburgh, where he was a graduate student in the robotics program at Carnegie Mellon University. He’d write up his dissertation, undergo the grilling every thesis committee is supposed to do, hopefully get his PhD and then a job—maybe join the faculty of his alma mater’s Robotics Institute, home to more robotics brainpower than anywhere on earth, or maybe join one of the start-ups that occasionally spun out of the university. In any event, he’d start making money, enough for him and his wife to have the kids they’d been putting off while Urmson finished his studies.
The campsite that Urmson’s research group chose amounted to little more than a handful of bright yellow dome tents, a slightly bigger meeting tent—where they kept the computers—and a pickup. And Hyperion. Hyperion was the robot. Not the conventional kind of robot. No arms and legs. Rather, Hyperion sat on a quartet of bike tires and was roofed with solar panels and powered with an electric motor. Hyperion was the reason why Urmson, and his fellow scientists from Carnegie Mellon and NASA’s Ames