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The self-driving automobile company, Waymo, has made another big step forward this week in its ambitions to usher in a new era of robotic taxis.
The company has received authorization to carry passengers in its cars in its state of California, provided that they do not pay for the ride and that there is a driver responsible for human security at wheel.
Waymo launched in 2018 the first standalone commercial self-service service in the United States, Waymo One, in parts of Arizona.
But, Sebastian Thrun, the man who gave birth to Waymo in the world at the time when autonomous cars was a crazy idea in Google, said that all of this might not have happened. occurred if the founder and CEO of Google, Larry Page, had a stubborn drag.
In the mid-2000s, Thrun was leading a spectacular career in the academic world of robotic vehicles, first at Carnegie Mellon (still renowned for its research, hence its program that rivals the program for the first time). Uber), then to Stanford.
In 2005, his Stanford team won the DARPA challenge with a million dollar award thanks to a robot called Stanley who was crossing the desert at high speed. In 2007, his Stanford team built a robot called Junior that won the second place of the DARPA competition, which rewards a million dollars by performing 60 km of tasks on a simulated urban landscape track, involving tracing stunt traffic and other robots. competitors.
Two years later, Page called, wanting to make these academic victories a real thing to use by real people on real roads.
In what he describes as the most "embarrassing" story of his career, Thrun mocked himself.
"In 2009, while I had officially become the godfather of autonomous cars and the world expert (there were maybe four or five experts, but I was certainly at the top of my field) Larry Page comes to me and says, "Hey, Sebastian, I want you to make a car in California that can drive anywhere in California, on any road. Until then, the best we've ever seen was an empty dessert strip or an empty city where you could go 10-15 miles an hour. Now he wanted me to drive cars at suburban time at 45 mph or 75 mph on [Interstate] 280, "Thrun told Business Insider recently.
"My instinctive reaction was," No, it can not be done. "
He turned the page flat and thought it was the end of it.
Of course not. "I'm embarrassed when I talk about it." Larry came back the next day and said, "Hey, Sebastian, let's talk about that." Why can not we do it and I said, "That's it. can not be done. "
Shortly after that, Page came back and said, "Okay, you say it can not be done, you're the expert, I trust you, so I can explain to Sergey why this can not be done. not be done, give me a technical reason, why can not that be done? "Thrun remembered.
He had thought of the risks of taking technology as it was and putting it on the road with real people (and he still thinks about those risks today).
Read: This Amazon administrator has helped Alexa to use 60,000 devices, but claims to have really understood that only when her child came home from school.
But when he was pushed on the idea, he had to admit Page and himself: "Oh, I can not find any technical reason." And that was the beginning of the Waymo team That's right, because then, he said, Ok Sebastian, maybe you're right, but if there's a 10% chance you're wrong, let's try, because maybe you can to save 1 million lives a year on the streets. "
This argument has pushed him to leave the limits of university research and to try to build autonomous cars that could someday become a real product used by real people. Page "somehow persuaded me to do it," says Thrun.
And only "about 18 months later, this car was rolling in almost every street in California, we participated in the 1,000-kilometer off-road challenge, called Google 1000, where we had to drive completely out of the way," he recalls. .
Today, of course, he proudly quotes that cars have traveled more than 10 million kilometers. Waymo left Google in 2016 to become his own company. Earlier this year, Waymo announced the opening of a factory in Detroit for the mass production of its vehicles. And Thrun himself became a prolific entrepreneur. He then founded Udacity, an online school, which he runs as CEO. He is also CEO of Page's next robotic vehicle company, Kitty Hawk, who works on flying cars.
But the moment when Page questioned his knee jerk was not a lesson the teacher never forgot: the best ideas are the ones everyone finds crazy, especially the experts.
"It was embarrassing for me because I was the world expert and I was supposed to be the person who knows what was going on and I was the worst person to ask questions about," Thrun said. "But experts tend to be experts of the past, not of the future."
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