PJ Vogt

Chris didn't think that philosophy was an option for their team.

Even if their cars were statistically safer than human drivers, he knew that the first news story about a self-driving car in a fatal accident was going to be a huge deal.

Anecdote was going to demolish data if they weren't extremely careful.

By all accounts, Anthony Lewandowski felt differently.

But he actually wasn't the only one.

Here's Don Burnett.

There were some people on the team, very famously, including myself, that started to get the itch kind of towards the three to four year mark.

The itch of like, okay, where is this going?

Who is it for?

How are they going to use it?

Where are they going to use it?

And I felt like the leadership didn't have great answers to that.

There was no commercial race, right?

We had no competition and there was no market for the product.

But competition would soon arrive in the form of Uber.

This was the oh shit moment for me.

Uber announced their self-driving program.

And I remember like it was yesterday, waking up, reading the news, going to my desk in the morning and thinking, oh crap, these guys are going to eat our lunch.

In 2013, then CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, had gotten a ride in one of Google's prototype driverless cars.

Sitting in a taxi without a human driver, he'd understood that this could mean the end of his company.