So when you look at transportation today,
it's really amazing.
You get from A to B just so quickly compared
to a hundred years ago.
But, the cost of that, in the US, 33,000 people
are killed every year.
To put that in perspective, it's the leading
cause of death for people between the ages
of 4 and 34.
It's more dangerous than cancer, it's more
dangerous than gun violence.
When you look worldwide, the number's even
more scary.
It's 1.2 million people killed every year.
90 plus percent of that is human error.
And so if we can bring in technology that's
always paying attention, that can see what's
going on around it, that never gets distracted,
this is a huge opportunity.
This is one of these 10x kind of opportunities
to save lives and make the world a better
place.
People have been thinking about self-driving
cars basically since we've had cars.
And then along came the DARPA Grand Challenges
in the early 2000s.
I and a number of folks on the team had taken
part in those, and they were really exciting.
They were kind of like the Woodstock for Robotics.
And then in 2008, Sebastian Thrun, who was
at Google, started talk with some of the leadership
here and started to think about the fact that
self-driving cars is really a computer science
problem.
And it's this huge computer science problem
that will have a big impact on the world,
and thus it's exactly the kind of problem
that Google likes to solve.
And when we kicked off the project, the question
was, is this even possible?
Could you actually have cars that drive themselves
out on the road?
And so we set for ourselves two audacious
goals.
One was to drive 100,000 miles on public roads.
To put that in perspective, this is an order
of magnitude more than anyone had ever driven
before.
And then the other was to drive 1,000 miles
of really interesting places.
After about a year and a half, we were actually
able to complete that challenge, and that
told us we actually had technology that could
work.
Today, one of the things we're most focused
on is making the car drive naturally.
We want the car to be on the road, we want
it to have all the aspects of the best human
drivers, we want it to be courteous, we want
it to be defensive, but we want it to drive
in a way that you can expect how it will behave
on the road because that makes you safe around
it as another driver.
If you go back to the Darpa Challenges, the
vehicles driving round really were robots.
They would accelerate hard, they would break
hard.
With our vehicles today, they have to be good
for our occupants, they have to be nice and
smooth and safe, and that has to be very naturalistic.
As a human, it's really easy to get uncomfortable.
You've probably experienced this when somebody
else drives for you, and you sit in the passenger
seat and they hit the brakes late or they
hit the brakes too early, and you get a little
tense about that.
The other is from the outside of the car,
we want it to feel natural for the other drivers
because when it's natural it's safe.
And so our vehicles move very smoothly on
the road, they pay attention, and if anything
they're more courteous and more defensive
drivers than normal drivers.
When self-driving cars are a reality, it's
going to be amazing.
Imagine never losing someone to a traffic
accident again.
Imagine a world where you get in your car,
it takes you where you wanna go, and then
you get out.
And you don't have to search for parking,
you just leave it, and it goes off and helps
someone else get where they're going.
Imagine cities where parking garages aren't
there, where that land has been turned into
into homes or into parks, it's just gonna
be amazing.
It's gonna be an exciting place.
