So when you look at transportation today, it's really amazing.
You get from A to B just so quickly compared to a hundred years ago.
But, the cost of that, in the US, 33,000 people are killed every year.
To put that in perspective, it's the leading cause of death for people between the ages
of 4 and 34.
It's more dangerous than cancer, it's more dangerous than gun violence.
When you look worldwide, the number's even more scary.
It's 1.2 million people killed every year.
90 plus percent of that is human error.
And so if we can bring in technology that's always paying attention, that can see what's
going on around it, that never gets distracted, this is a huge opportunity.
This is one of these 10x kind of opportunities to save lives and make the world a better
place.
People have been thinking about self-driving cars basically since we've had cars.
And then along came the DARPA Grand Challenges in the early 2000s.
I and a number of folks on the team had taken part in those, and they were really exciting.
They were kind of like the Woodstock for Robotics.
And then in 2008, Sebastian Thrun, who was at Google, started talk with some of the leadership
here and started to think about the fact that self-driving cars is really a computer science
problem.
And it's this huge computer science problem that will have a big impact on the world,
and thus it's exactly the kind of problem that Google likes to solve.
And when we kicked off the project, the question was, is this even possible?
Could you actually have cars that drive themselves out on the road?
And so we set for ourselves two audacious goals.
One was to drive 100,000 miles on public roads.
To put that in perspective, this is an order of magnitude more than anyone had ever driven
before.
And then the other was to drive 1,000 miles of really interesting places.
After about a year and a half, we were actually able to complete that challenge, and that
told us we actually had technology that could work.
Today, one of the things we're most focused on is making the car drive naturally.
We want the car to be on the road, we want it to have all the aspects of the best human
drivers, we want it to be courteous, we want it to be defensive, but we want it to drive
in a way that you can expect how it will behave on the road because that makes you safe around
it as another driver.
If you go back to the Darpa Challenges, the vehicles driving round really were robots.
They would accelerate hard, they would break hard.
With our vehicles today, they have to be good for our occupants, they have to be nice and
smooth and safe, and that has to be very naturalistic.
As a human, it's really easy to get uncomfortable.
You've probably experienced this when somebody else drives for you, and you sit in the passenger
seat and they hit the brakes late or they hit the brakes too early, and you get a little
tense about that.
The other is from the outside of the car, we want it to feel natural for the other drivers
because when it's natural it's safe.
And so our vehicles move very smoothly on the road, they pay attention, and if anything
they're more courteous and more defensive drivers than normal drivers.
When self-driving cars are a reality, it's going to be amazing.
Imagine never losing someone to a traffic accident again.
Imagine a world where you get in your car, it takes you where you wanna go, and then
you get out.
And you don't have to search for parking, you just leave it, and it goes off and helps
someone else get where they're going.
Imagine cities where parking garages aren't there, where that land has been turned into
into homes or into parks, it's just gonna be amazing.
It's gonna be an exciting place.