PJ Vogt

That's what he'd wanted to do his thesis on before being guided by some wise PhD advisor toward search engines instead.

Now, as a spectator at DARPA's second Grand Challenge, he can see real-world evidence that autonomous vehicles might actually be a thing.

At first, Larry Page hires Sebastian Thrun, along with fellow DARPA contestant Anthony Lewandowski, just to build what will become Google Street View.

They'll actually modify the system that Stanley the Car's roof-mounted cameras had used to begin photographing American streets.

But before long, Larry Page returns to Sebastian with his dream of a driverless car.

And so how soon after arriving at Google does Project Chauffeur begin?

Like, Larry Page says to you, I have a mission.

Like, how does this happen?

This is an embarrassing moment for me.

It's about two years later, 2009, where I sit in my cubicle and Larry Page comes by and says, Sebastian, I think you should build a self-driving car that can drive anywhere in the world.

And my immediate reaction was, no, taking the technology we built for this empty desert and putting it in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco is going to kill somebody.

And Larry would come back the next day with the same idea, and I would give him the same answer.

And both of us got increasingly more frustrated.

Like, God damn it, it can't be done.

And eventually he came and said, look, Sebastian, okay, I get it.

You can't do it.

I want to explain to Eric Schmidt, the CEO at the time, and Sergey Brin, my co-founder, why it can't be done.

Can you give me the technical reason why it can't be done?

And that's the moment of incredible pain because I go home and I can't think of a technical reason why not.

It was this kind of moment where I felt, look, I'm the world expert on self-driving cars and I'm the person who denies that it can be done.