PJ Vogt

Chris Ermson compared it to an Olympic marathon where the best runner only makes it two of the 26 miles.

What this contest had done, though, was it had flushed all these inventors out.

It had jump-started the scene that would develop this technology.

One of the most important people there that day, actually just watching, was someone I haven't mentioned yet, a legendary roboticist named Sebastian Thrun.

Sebastian Thrun, he was at the first Grand Challenge.

He didn't bring a team.

He wasn't participating.

DARPA wanted to show off some other projects they'd been funding, including one of his robots.

So he brings the robot, and so he's there.

And he watches this disaster, and he thinks, I can do better than this.

I looked at the very first iteration of this Grand Challenge where I didn't participate.

I was a spectator.

This, of course, is Sebastian Thrun.

He grew up in West Germany, moved to the US, taught at Carnegie Mellon before moving to Stanford.

Watching that day, he saw this fundamental error he believed all the entrants had made.

I saw that all the teams treated this like a hardware problem.

They looked at this and say, we have to build a world with bigger wheels and bigger chassis and so on.

And I looked at this and said, well, wait a minute.

The challenge really is to build a self-driving car that can drive through the desert.

I can get a rental car.