Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car - And How It Will Reshape Our World. Lawrence Burns
and a member of CEO Rick Wagoner’s thirteen-person strategy board, which was responsible for making the automaker’s biggest decisions.
In Frankfurt, I was heading back to my hotel when my cell phone rang. It was GM security, which was unusual. What was even more unusual was the tension in the caller’s voice. The security officer said he could not get into the details, but that as soon as I arrived at the hotel I was to proceed to a specific conference room.
I’d never received a call like that.
When I entered the conference room, several other GM Automotive Strategy Board members were present and the TV was turned on. I could see on the screen that one of the World Trade Center towers was on fire. Minutes later I watched a jetliner fly into the second tower.
It took three days before I was able to get home from Germany. I did a lot of thinking as those days passed. Many theories exist to explain why the attacks occurred. But it’s impossible to ignore that one contributing factor was U.S. dependence on oil imported from the Middle East.
I couldn’t help but feel as though the auto industry bore some blame for what happened. America was dependent on foreign oil because we needed it to power the cars and trucks that GM produced. Our customers enjoyed great freedom with GM products. But, I asked myself, was this freedom worth the price? For me, 9/11 screamed that the status quo of the auto industry, dominated as it was by gas-powered combustion engines, was unacceptable. And thanks to my job leading GM’s R&D, I was in a position to do something about this. In fact, I felt like it was my responsibility to accelerate the development of alternatives to the current transportation system.
Soon, I developed a profile as the highest-ranked Detroit auto executive pulling for wholesale reform of America’s automobile-based transportation system. (As I recall, the only other person in Detroit who was talking about the problems in the same way was William Clay Ford, Jr.)
Oil dependence, safety issues, traffic congestion and global warming—these and other ills were solvable, I argued in speeches and articles, if only we’d transform the auto industry. I focused on redefining the “design DNA” of automobiles based on electric drive and computerized controls, and I illustrated what was possible with the now renowned GM Autonomy concept car, which debuted at the 2002 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. (Autonomy was based on a skateboard-like platform similar to what underlies today’s Tesla models.) I also steered GM toward a portfolio of alternative-propulsion systems based on hydrogen fuel cells, advanced batteries and biofuels, and arranged for GM to sponsor Carnegie Mellon’s Team Tartan, which won the DARPA Urban Challenge by creating a robot version of a Chevy Tahoe. And as GM and its competitors fought to survive the 2008–2009 recession, I pushed to develop an autonomous, shareable and electric concept vehicle, the GM EN-V, that foresaw our self-driving future.
Those were the auto industry’s darkest days, and while GM and Chrysler went bankrupt, and Ford mortgaged itself to narrowly avoid the same fate, a handful of auto industry outsiders began to challenge Detroit’s dominance in a stunning convergence of new technology and innovative business models. This was the period in which Google gathered together the brightest engineering talent from the DARPA challenges and launched its Chauffeur self-driving car project. Upstart Tesla delivered its first Roadster in 2008, highlighting the promise of electric vehicles with outstanding performance using lithium-ion batteries. And shortly after that, scrappy start-ups Uber and Lyft, among others, established an enormous market for ride sharing and began the decoupling of people from personal ownership of automobiles. While Detroit was fighting for its life, the seeds of the mobility revolution were being planted by companies from outside the auto industry, by players with a bone-deep understanding of digital technology and a passion for designing and delivering compelling transportation experiences.
I left GM soon after the 2009 bankruptcy and, among other new positions, became the director of the Program on Sustainable Mobility at Columbia University, working out of economist Jeff Sachs’s Earth Institute. There, I initiated the first research project to examine the economic implications of a future that saw transportation disrupted by three separate but related factors—shared-use vehicles, powered by electric motors, and driven autonomously. While each individual factor promised significant change, I was more interested in what would result when they converged. The expert math modeler Bill Jordan and I calculated in 2011 that the deployment of such an integrated system could reduce the annual costs of automobile travel in the U.S. alone by $4 trillion—about the same amount as the entire budget of the federal government. More to the point, our research suggested that driverless electric vehicles tailor-designed for shared transportation service in U.S. cities could reduce the out-of-pocket and time costs of conventional automobile travel by more than 80 percent (from $1.50 per mile to $0.25 per mile)—while providing safer and more convenient mobility.
Soon after I began that work I was recruited by Chauffeur’s project leader, Sebastian Thrun, and engineering lead, Chris Urmson, as an adviser, a role I continue to hold today. In my eighth year at what is now called Waymo, advising one of the most exciting endeavors in engineering history, I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Sebastian, Chris and such fascinating characters as Anthony Levandowski, Bryan Salesky, Mike Montemerlo, Dmitri Dolgov and Adam Frost, as well as Waymo CEO John Krafcik.
In 2018, Waymo achieved the realization of a dream that first gathered the team together in 2009—the deployment of autonomous, shared, electric vehicles. And the number of major companies testing these vehicles everywhere from Miami to San Francisco to New York City is now approaching the dozens. Self-driving cars equipped with electric motors and deployed in a transportation-service model are poised to become the biggest thing to hit the automobile industry since the invention of the automobile itself. We are entering a new age of automobility, which redefines the freedom provided by today’s automobiles, promising better mobility for more people at lower cost. The implications are profound, not just in terms of how our lives will change, but also for the automobile industry and everything it touches.
The resultant 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