PJ Vogt

But I think we quickly realized that we're not going to be able to name all these vehicles as we scale up our fleet, and so we just started to number them, like, you know, Prius 27.

This is Don Burnett.

He'd been a researcher working on autonomous submarines.

He lost a friend in a car accident, separately got in a bad accident himself, and decided he wanted to do work on self-driving cars.

That's how he eventually ended up on the team in its early days.

I was on the motion planning and behavior decision-making team, and my responsibility was to work on the nudging behavior.

Nudging, when a big truck passes a human driver on the right, the driver will nudge a little to the left.

For us, it's an instinct.

Don's job was to teach a computer to nudge.

You're trying to encode the behavior that you would use as a driver under kind of partially good perception.

And it's a really tricky problem.

A team of academic roboticists, some of whom had had friends die in cars, spending Google's money to see if they could make driving safer.

It was a weird era.

There's this big concert venue near Google's offices called the Shoreline Amphitheater.

In 2009, you could have seen Sheryl Crow there, the killers, Phish.

But the most interesting show that year was one almost nobody knew about.

In the venue parking lot, on days when there was no concert, no tour buses around to see them, the Google team would run its first test runs of their driverless cars, essentially hiding in plain sight.

A Prius driving itself around the amphitheater parking lot with an attentive safety driver sitting behind the wheel, just in case.

The team was making sure the basics functioned, that the sensors could really recognize another car, that the computer in the car was abiding by their orders.

These were the baby steps that happened in this parking lot and at an empty airplane runway that was close to their offices.