PJ Vogt

Spring 2009, the team tries actual, real road driving for the first time.

Chris Urmson takes one of the Priuses out on the Central Expressway.

Speed limit, 45 miles per hour.

There are humans driving here.

And immediately, outside the confines of the empty parking lot and empty airplane runway, here's what's clear.

They had a real problem.

The car was swerving wildly.

One more problem to fix.

Listening to this story, it's funny because I can imagine it giving me a totally different feeling than it does.

A tech company with nobody's permission was testing driverless cars on public roads in California.

I don't know why that strikes me as being about invention instead of just hubris and impunity.

Maybe it's because I know that Google would be one of the few tech companies whose driverless cars would not cause any fatal accidents in testing.

and that the team would just take more safety precautions than the other companies who'd rush in later to catch up with them once this was an arms race.

The way these cars were designed, the safety driver sat behind the steering wheel, ready to take over.

In the other seat was their partner, watching the monitor displaying a graphical interface designed by Dmitry Dolgov.

The people watching the screen would call out problems ahead, some discrepancy between what the sensors were seeing and what was actually in the road.

This is what teaching a car to drive actually looked like.

Two-person teams manning the cars, logging errors, going back to the office to troubleshoot, and then updating the code.

I asked Don Burnett about this era.

And while you're doing this and then like you leave work and you get in your car that you drive as a human, did you find yourself thinking more carefully like, how do I know what I know when I'm driving?