PJ Vogt

Basically, should they follow the route that Tesla ultimately would?

Design self-driving as a feature in your car, something that could take over sometimes but still need human monitoring?

Or was it better to wait until the car could fully drive itself?

Thrun would eventually come around to this version of self-driving.

Specifically, he'd come around to the idea of self-driving robo-taxis.

A taxi service type system is way more capital efficient than ownership.

An owned car is being used about 4% of the time and it's parked 96% of the time.

Imagine a city without parked cars where every car is being utilized, call it 50% of the time, which means we have like only 10% number of cars needed that we need today when we all own cars.

That's going to happen.

There's no absolute question.

What Sebastian is describing here so matter-of-factly is a fairly radical re-imagination of American cities.

The idea that robo-taxis would be so cheap and widely available that most people just wouldn't own cars, that we could put something else, anything else, in the places where we put most of our parking lots and parking spaces, that is a far-fetched idea, just given how much of American identity is tied into personal car ownership.

A far-fetched idea, and for it to begin to happen, Google would have to bring a product to market.

But the years passed, and they didn't.

And some people who were there felt stuck.

Don Burnett says he believes life at Google got dangerously cushy.

The food was great.

The money was, too.

These former academics making much more than they'd ever expected.

there was a lack of urgency on the team to actually make something viable.