PJ Vogt

To get off to a running start, the team licenses the code from Stanford's DARPA Urban Challenge vehicle.

Anthony Lewandowski goes to a local Toyota dealership and buys eight Priuses, takes them back to Google, and retrofits them to accept a computer as a driver.

He hooks that computer driver electronically into the brakes, the gas, the steering.

These Priuses get a radar system behind the bumper, cameras, a LiDAR system spinning 360 degrees on top.

LiDAR like radar, but it shoots lasers instead of sound waves.

At first, the team gives each Prius a cool name, like Knight Rider.

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.