PJ Vogt

Anthony Lewandowski, the flashy motorcycle guy, would work on hardware.

Dmitry Dolgov, another DARPA veteran, would be responsible for planning and optimization.

It was a secret project.

They'd report directly to Larry Page, a small enough team that there'd be no bureaucracy, few emails, fewer meetings.

Just 11 engineers who writer Alex Davies says represented some of the best young talent in the country.

And so Google builds this very quiet team, and it says to them,

build us a self-driving car.

And because that goal is super nebulous, they give them two challenges.

They say, safely log 100,000 miles on public roads, but they also give them a challenge called the Larry 1K.

So Larry and Sergey and I sat together and the two of them carved out a thousand total miles of road surface in California.

They open up Google Maps and they just click around and they look for 10 separate 100-mile routes

that are really tricky.

Absolutely everything, like the Bay Bridge and Lake Tahoe and Highway 1 to Los Angeles and Market Street and even Crooked Lombard Street.

And they say to the team, you have to drive each of these 100-mile routes without one human takeover of the system, without one failure of the car.

To get off to a running start, the team licenses the code from Stanford's DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle.

Anthony Lewandowski goes to a local Toyota dealership and buys eight Priuses, takes them back to Google, and retrofits them to accept a computer as a driver.

He hooks that computer driver electronically into the brakes, the gas, the steering.

These Priuses get a radar system behind the bumper, cameras, a LiDAR system spinning 360 degrees on top.

LiDAR like radar, but it shoots lasers instead of sound waves.

At first, the team gives each Prius a cool name, like Knight Rider.