As a boy,
I loved cars.
When I turned 18,
I lost my best friend to a car accident.
Like this.
And then I decided I'd dedicate my life
to saving one million people
every year.
Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report,
but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.
I saw the concept first
in the DARPA Grand Challenges
where the U.S. government issued a prize
to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert.
And even though a hundred teams were there,
these cars went nowhere.
So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car.
We built the hardware and the software.
We made it learn from us,
and we set it free in the desert.
And the unimaginable happened:
it became the first car
to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge,
winning Stanford 2 million dollars.
Yet I still hadn't saved a single life.
Since, our work has focused
on building driving cars
that can drive anywhere by themselves --
any street in California.
We've driven 140,000 miles.
Our cars have sensors
by which they magically can see
everything around them
and make decisions
about every aspect of driving.
It's the perfect driving mechanism.
We've driven in cities,
like in San Francisco here.
We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.
We've encountered joggers,
busy highways, toll booths,
and this is without a person in the loop;
the car just drives itself.
In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles,
people didn't even notice.
Mountain roads,
day and night,
and even crooked Lombard Street
in San Francisco.
(Laughter)
Sometimes our cars get so crazy,
they even do little stunts.
(Video) Man: Oh, my God.
What?
Second Man: It's driving itself.
Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life,
but I can do something for all the people who died.
Do you know that driving accidents
are the number one cause of death for young people?
And do you realize that almost all of those
are due to human error
and not machine error,
and can therefore be prevented by machines?
Do you realize
that we could change the capacity of highways
by a factor of two or three
if we didn't rely on human precision
on staying in the lane --
improve body position
and therefore drive a little bit closer together
on a little bit narrower lanes,
and do away with all traffic jams on highways?
Do you realize that you, TED users,
spend an average
of 52 minutes per day
in traffic,
wasting your time
on your daily commute?
You could regain this time.
This is four billion hours
wasted in this country alone.
And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted.
Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology,
and I'm really looking forward to a time
when generations after us look back at us
and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.
Thank you.
(Applause)