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- [00:02]
Narrator
Wonder. It's December 2024, and in Phoenix, Arizona, Mike Johns is trapped inside a driverless taxi. John's Waymo has arrived at his destination, the airport terminal. But instead of stopping to drop him off, the vehicle keeps looping through the parking lot over and over. The robo taxi is now on its sixth lap of the lot, and John's can't open the doors. If he can't get out soon, he'll miss his flight.
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Gab (Waymo Support Representative)
Hi there, Mike. This is Gab. I'm calling from Waymo Support. I'm just calling because I received a notification that your car might be experiencing some routing issue. Please bear with me while I am.
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Narrator
Yeah, I got a flight to catch. Why is this thing going in a circle? I'm getting dizzy. The Waymo representative tells Johns to try using the stop command on the Waymo app.
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Gab (Waymo Support Representative)
I don't have an option to go to control the car.
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Narrator
Oh, my gosh. After several minutes, the representative finally finds a way to stop the ride. John's bolts for the terminal shaken and vowing never to ride in a robo taxi again. But in a growing number of US cities, passengers don't have this choice. A tap in an app might summon a human driver or a car with no driver at all. And leading this driverless revolution is Waymo, Google's 20 year quest to build not a car, but a driver. Waymo says its vehicles have now driven more than 100 million autonomous miles. That's the equivalent of traveling to the moon and back 200 times. But this journey has cost Google's parent company Alphabet billions. With profits still somewhere over the horizon, and the competition, Tesla, Amazon, Zoox and China's Baidu is closing in fast, betting that speed, not caution, will win the race. But is this the dawn of a trillion dollar industry or just another sparkly Silicon Valley mirage. From Wondery? I'm David Brown, and this is business war. You know, driverless taxis have been promised for years, and now that promise is finally starting to take shape. Today, in cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles and Shanghai, people can hail rides with no one behind the wheel. Technology that once felt like science fiction has slipped into the everyday. In some places at least. But the journey has been long. It's been costly and full of wrong turns. And the next stretch may prove even more challenging. Building a car that can see and think like a human has proven to be far harder than even Google's engineers imagined. Mapping streets is one thing. Teaching AI how to react to emergency vehicles, spot chain link fences, or respond to a construction worker waving traffic through the wrong lane. That's another matter. Even something as ordinary as a plastic bag drifting across the road can confuse the vehicle's cameras. And then there are the human hurdles. Regulators aren't sure who to ticket when a driverless taxi breaks the rules. Insurance companies can't agree on who's to blame when an accident occurs. And many passengers still aren't ready to trust an empty driver's seat. One recent poll found just 9% of people said they trust a self driving car, while 66% actively fear them. Yet despite all the uncertainty, the money keeps flowing. Billions of dollars have already been poured into bringing these vehicles to market. At the head of the pack is Waymo, the Alphabet owned pioneer that's been chasing autonomous driving for almost 20 years. The long, complicated push to create self driving cars is a story of dreamers, geniuses and painful double crossings. And the true winner of this race has yet to be determined. This is episode one to build a driver. It's 2002 at the University of California, Berkeley. In a cluttered lab, a 22 year old graduate student hunches over a desk scattered with circuit boards and toy parts, with a phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. His name is Anthony Lewandowski. He's Belgian, ambitious, and already known around campus as the kid who never sleeps. On a shelf behind him sits his latest creation, a small LEGO robot that sorts Monopoly money by color. Sounds trivial, but that little robot has just won him a national robotics prize and a reputation as the campus prodigy who can build anything out of almost nothing. Lewandowski's on the phone with his mother in Brussels. She's just read an article about a new US government competition. A million dollar challenge that sounds almost impossible. The contest is run by a US government agency and it's offering a prize of $1 million for the first vehicle that can drive itself across the Mojave Desert. The contest has an exhilarating, romantic name, the Grand Challenge. Lewandowski pauses. A driverless car. To most people, it sounds like science fiction to Lewandowski, a bright engineering student who still believes that with enough intelligence and dedication, anything is possible. Well, it sounds like an opportunity. The competition is the start of a journey that will pull him from Berkeley's labs into the heart of Silicon Valley and eventually into one of the fiercest rivalries in tech history. The agency behind this million dollar competition is DARPA, the U.S. department of Defense's secretive engine of innovation. Formed after the Soviet launch of Sputnik, DARPA's mission is to ensure America is Never again caught technologically flat footed. The Internet began as a DARPA project, and the agency has played a huge role in other technologies too, such as satellite navigation, voice assistants like Siri, and even the graphical interfaces that help make personal computing usable. Now DARPA has turned its attention to driverless cars. The push comes from the war in Afghanistan, where US Troops are being killed by roadside bombs hidden along convoy routes. Congress wants to remove soldiers from harm's way wherever possible, and it has tasked DARPA with an ambitious build autonomous military vehicles by 2015. The grand challenge is DARPA's attempt to jumpstart this effort. It's a desert race open to anyone who can build a vehicle that drives itself nearly 150 miles across the Mojave. No remote controls, no human staring from afar. Each vehicle must sense the world, make decisions, and drive on its own. Like many others, Lewandowski first considers building a car. But one day, riding through the California hills, a pack of motorcyclists whips past him, which sparks an idea. A motorcycle would be harder to automate than a car. Far harder. But it would also set Lewandowski apart. DARPA wants bold ideas, and surely no one else is attempting to automate two wheels instead of four. If he can make a bike balance and steer itself through through the desert, he won't just be another entrant, he'll be unforgettable. This is a master class in differentiation. Lewandowski knows he's an underdog with less money and fewer resources than the big teams. So instead of trying to beat them at their own game, he changes the game entirely. He picks a project so audaciously difficult that even if it fails, he'll succeed in separating himself from the herd. You know, in a crowded market, sometimes the riskiest move is actually the safest way to get noticed. With a rough plan in mind, Lewandowski joins forces with a small group of fellow UC Berkeley engineers who call themselves the Blue Team. They mount two cameras on the handlebars to function like a pair of eyes and strap a cluster of computers to the frame. The computers use the cameras to read the road, steer and adjust the bike's balance. There's no one with a joystick standing in the background, no tether to a laptop. In theory, this bike can drive itself. In practice, however, it falls over a lot. Hundreds of times. The bike topples, clattering onto the asphalt. And each time, Lewandowski hauls it upright, patches the damage, tweaks the programming and tries once more. Every crash brings him one step Closer to a self driving motorcycle. He calls it Ghost Rider, a fitting name for a machine that seems haunted by its struggle to stay upright. It's March 2004, and in the Mojave Desert, the countdown to the start of the first grand challenge is underway. The starting line looks like something out of Mario Kart. Fifteen experimental vehicles are lined up in the dirt. Cars, trucks, and a single motorcycle, each one promising to drive itself across nearly 150 miles of rough desert. Ghostrider, Lewandowski's autonomous Yamaha is the only bike in the field, and it looks wildly out of place, even among the hulking four wheelers beside it. A beige Humvee named Sandstorm idles nearby. It was built by a team from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, including a young roboticist named Chris Urmson. Unlike Lewandowski's camera based system, the Carnegie Mellon crew relies on something new. Lidar. That stands for Light Detection and ranging. And it's a sensor that fires thousands of laser pulses a second, measuring how long each takes to bounce back. Lidar allows Sandstorm to build a three dimensional map of the world in real time. The marshal waves a flag and the robotic vehicles lurch forward. Chaos ensues. One truck veers into a barrier. Another plows into a ditch. A third clips a fence post and flips over. Lewandowski's Ghost Rider wobbles for a few heroic seconds, then tips over right at the starting line. By the end of the first mile, one vehicle is on its side and another's tangled in barbed wire. By mile seven, only Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm is still moving. But soon, even the Humvee finds itself stranded on a mound of dirt, its wheels spinning, helpless. By the time the race is over, not a single vehicle has finished the course. Sandstorm made it the furthest 7.4 miles. But despite his bike's failure, Lewandowski stood out to one spectator for his ingenuity and persistence. That spectator is the founder of Velodyne, a small California firm that wants to develop LIDAR for future autonomous vehicles. Velodyne's founder hires Lewandowski as a salesman with engineering. Know how? Hmm. See what happened there? In the corporate world, we're often terrified of failure. But in the startup world, a spectacular, ambitious failure is often worth more than mediocre success. Velodyne didn't hire Lewandowski for the result. The bike fell over. After all, they hired him for his hustle. In other words, they bought the engineer, not the engine. When someone's looking for talent, they may not be looking for the win as much as the will to make big things happen. A few days later, a small group of engineers from Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm team is at the AM General campus in South Bend, Indiana. That's the birthplace of the Humvee. They're here to show the heavy vehicle maker what their robot truck can do. If the demo goes well, they'll walk away with free parts and maybe even a Humvee or two they can use for tests. Inside a nearby conference room, one team member is giving a PowerPoint presentation about their technology to a group of AM general executives. Outside in the parking lot, two teammates are prepping Sandstorm for the demonstration. With a few test runs, Sandstorm's goal today seems simple. Navigate an obstacle course designed to teach new Humvee owners what their vehicles can handle. The course includes a concrete tabletop structure that stands about 18 inches off the ground. Sandstorm is supposed to drive itself up and onto that structure. One of the engineers looks up from his computer, then signals to his colleague. Alright, systems online. Let's do this. His colleague stands ready with a remote kill switch. A fail safe in case the vehicle goes rogue. Copy that. Okay, here we go. Sandstorm's engine growls to life. The robo Humvee jolts forward a little faster than expected. Whoa, there. Ease it up, buddy. But Sandstorm doesn't ease up. It accelerates. The engineer hammers the kill switch, but the signal takes a couple of seconds to reach the vehicle. Sandstorm slams straight into the concrete block, leaving a dent big enough to slip a fist into. The engineers scramble to check for damage. The sensors are intact, bumpers scuffed, but the Humvee can still drive. They restart it for a second run. This time, Sandstorm is supposed to swing wide, away from the barrier. Instead, its wheels turn sharply toward the building, where AM General's executives are still listening to the PowerPoint pitch. No, not. Not that way. Kill it. Hey. Too late. Sandstorm plows into the side of the building with a metallic thud that shakes the windows. The executives spring from their chairs and rush outside to find the robotic Humvee idling against the wall. A fresh scrape in its bodywork. The Carnegie Melon team braces for disaster and a large, long drive home. But the executives just laugh. AM General built the Humvee to push limits, and that's exactly what the Sandstorm team is doing. An executive strides over to the group. Okay, boys, okay, we'll give you two Humvees. Just look, be careful with these ones, okay? It's October 2005. Eighteen months after the chaos of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, and now a new lineup of driverless vehicles is seeking glory. This time, 23 teams are lined up outside Prim, Nevada, ready to send their robots across 132 miles of dust, rock and canyon. The Carnegie Mellon crew includes, including Chris Urmson is back with the latest incarnation of Sandstorm, their automated Humvee. They're eager to prove that last year's crashes were just the beginning of something bigger. But they're not the only ones with something to prove. Their toughest competition is Stanley, a gleaming VW Tuareg built with corporate backing from Volkswagen's research labs in Palo Alto. At the center of Stanley's team stands Sebastian Thrun, a 38 year old Stanford professor with a boyish smile. He's a German born roboticist obsessed with machine learning and has spent years teaching computers to understand the real world. Volkswagen sees the project as a way to prove that its engineers can compete with Silicon Valley's brightest minds. For AM General, which still supports the Carnegie Mellon team, it's about demonstrating that its Humvees can handle anything. And for darpa, this race is still an experiment. One it hopes will lead to military vehicles ferrying weapons and supplies without the need for human occupants. It's science with big stakes. The prize pot has now doubled to $2 million. But whoever makes a well functioning autonomous vehicle first won't just win the cash. They'll potentially own the future of transportation. The race begins. Engines roar, dust clouds bloom. And one by one, the vehicles head into the desert. This time, something extraordinary happens. Instead of collapsing after a few miles, nearly every team's robot vehicle makes real progress. Machines that just 18 months earlier wobbled and crashed now carve perfect turns, brake on slopes and weave around boulders. All but One of the 23 entrants beat the seven mile record set by Sandstorm last year. Five complete the entire course, but the prize comes down to two contenders, Sandstorm and Stanley. Sandstorm finishes second. Stanley crossed the line just 11 minutes faster. Among the spectators lining the Nevada hills is one Larry Page, the co founder of Google. He's not just here for fun. He's come to scout talent. The morning after the DARPA Grand Challenge, Sebastian Thrun is a hero. His modified Volkswagen Stanley has just driven 132 miles of desert terrain without heat. Human intervention. A breakthrough that's caught the eye of Google's co founder. Page asks Thrun to visit Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California. It's the first of dozens of Meetings at Googleplex, in which the pair discuss and debate the promise of self driving cars and how they just might change the world. To Page, this technology isn't just a stunt. It's the next step in Google's corporate mission to organize the world's information. He believes that the most chaotic, dangerous information system on Earth is traffic. Autonomous cars, he says, could eliminate human error on the roads and reduce crashes by as much as 90%. And he wants Thrun to help Google make that happen. Thrun listens with mounting irritation. The DARPA races took place on a controlled desert course where there were no pedestrians, no delivery vans blocking the lane, no road work, no traffic lights. But the real world is different. It's unpredictable, messy, alive. Thrun tells Page that trying to build a robot that can handle this chaos is madness. Page doesn't blink. He asks for a technical reason not to pursue autonomous driving. Thrawn loses his temper, yelling, it can't be done, God damn it. This right here is the friction between a manager and a visionary. A manager looks at the current capabilities and sees roadblocks. A visionary like Page looks at the ultimate destination and ignores the road entirely. Paige isn't interested in better. He's interested in different. He's reframing the problem from how do we map the world? To how do we fix the driver? And usually the person asking the impossible question is the one who ends up owning the future. Thrawn leaves the meeting fuming. He spends the night searching for undeniable proof that what Page wants is impossible. But by morning, he has nothing. It's three years later at Lake Tahoe. Thrawn has gathered a small group of brilliant engineers to witness the birth of a secret project that will become Google's self driving car division. Chris Urmson, the calm Canadian engineer from Carnegie Mellon whose Humvee Sandstorm came in second in the DARPA race, is the project's technical lead. He's responsible for turning their prototypes into something that can drive on real roads. Anthony Lewandowski, the restless entrepreneur from Berkeley who built the Ghost Rider motorcycle, focuses on the hardware systems. His job is to make all the sensors, cameras, software, computers, engines, maps and brakes work together as a coherent system. Thrawn will guide the overall vision and ensure the project balances ambition and caution. Around the three men sit a handful of roboticists, AI specialists and map engineers from across Google, the sort of people Larry Page hand picks for projects too sensitive to speak about and too bold to fit anywhere in the company's normal structure. The group debates the challenge Ahead. How do you make a machine that not only drives, but thinks and reacts? Thrun tells them they're not building a robot car, they're building a driver. This insight becomes their North Star. The goal isn't to retrofit a vehicle or design roadside sensors or build control towers. Their goal is to put intelligence inside the car. But before they can build anything, they have to agree on what kind of project this is going to be. Larry Page has already signaled that he wants it done inside Google, where it can be protected, funded, kept out of sight. For the engineers gathered at Tahoe, this is a relief. Only a company with Google's resources could afford the computing power, mapping data, and sheer volume of time needed to make a self driving car possible. They give it a name that nods to the ambition to replace, not assist, the human behind the wheel. Project Chauffeur within months, the team begins testing modified Toyota Priuses around Mountain View, each topped with a spinning lidar dome. To passersby, they look like odd prototypes, some sort of lab equipment on wheels. But inside Google, they represent something utterly revolutionary. A mission to end the era of human drivers. Inside Google's secret X lab in Mountain View, California, the Project Chauffeur team is finally ready to move from theory to asphalt. Google co founder Larry Page has given them a simple but brutal target, and he's put real money behind it. If the Project Chauffeur team can successfully have an autonomous car drive 1,000 miles of complex California roads, or 100,000 miles total within two years, Page has promised the engineers enormous bonuses. The milestone becomes known as Larry's 1K. Thrun, Urmson and Lewandowski start by breaking the task into pieces. Instead of one long route, they design a patchwork of 10 mile segments, each one chosen to challenge the project's driving software in a different way. They choose a stretch of freeway to assess its merging and lane keeping, a climb into the Santa Cruz mountains to teach it how to break on hills. And a run through the famously windy Lombard street in San Francisco involving eight hairpin bins packed into a single city block to see if their machine can manage chaos. Ridges, tunnels, intersections, roundabouts. Each segment becomes a new test of judgment, timing and perception. For a human, these moments are instinctive. For a machine, they're puzzles to be solved. This is the classic answer to the question, how do you eat an elephant? Perhaps you've heard this one before. One bite at a time. See, if you give a team a massive, vague go like build a robot driver, chances are they'll freeze but if you break it down, you turn an impossible mountain into a series of climbable steps. These small winds keep the momentum going, especially when the finish line seems like it's still miles away. Day after day, the project Chauffeur team loads up their modified Toyota Priuses and sends them out onto California's back roads with their spinning lidar domes, capturing 3D maps of the world around. Each time they tweak the car's software, the car manages to drive a little farther before handing control back to the human in the driver's seat. The gains are incremental. This isn't a project built around major breakthroughs, but one that advances steadily, slowly. By breaking the problem to small, repeatable challenges, the engineers are doing something no one has done before. They're teaching a robot to handle the road, not as a controlled experiment, but as real life. Unpredictable, Messy. Human. At night, the engineers work late, taking their modified Toyota Priuses around the streets. Near the Google campus, the cars hum through the dark with spinning lidar domes on their roofs, alien shapes gliding past convenience stores and sleeping suburban homes. Officially, Project Chauffeur doesn't exist. Secrecy is paramount. The handful of people who do know about it refer to it only by codename. The rest of Google has no idea that the multi billion dollar company they work for is quietly teaching cars to drive themselves right outside its own parking lot. But every trip beyond Google's campus brings the risk of exposure. One night near Shoreline Boulevard, a five minute walk from Google hq, two engineers pull over to adjust a sensor. They crouch beside the modified Prius and hook the car up to their laptop through cable that snake across the curb. But then blue lights flash behind them. A Mountain View police officer steps from his cruiser. He looks from the open laptop to the spinning laser dome on the vehicle and demands to know what the two men are doing. For a moment, neither engineer speaks. Google's top secret project is about to be blown open by a night patrolman. Then one of the engineers straightens up, smiles, and in Russian, accented English, calmly tells the cop they work for Google. The officer studies them, shrugs, and drives away. The engineers exhale. Google's big secret is still intact. For now. By the spring of 2009, Google's self driving project is finally ready to face the real world. For months, the team has been testing their self driving systems in empty parking lots and on deserted roads. But now they're ready for their first public road trial. On the busy Central Expressway that runs straight through Silicon Valley, Chris Urmson sits in the driver's seat. He's not driving. He's here as a backup, ready to take the wheel if anything goes wrong. To keep things safe, Urmson has enlisted a few fellow Google engineers in their own cars. They line up ahead and behind the test vehicle, forming a protective convoy across every lane of the expressway, boxing out other traffic so the automated Prius can glide down the road in peace for a few glorious minutes. It works. The car holds its lane, changes speed, and behaves exactly as programmed. For the first time, Google's self driving system has handled real traffic on a real Silicon Valley highway. It's not dramatic, but inside Google, it feels historic. That same spring, a silver Toyota Prius hums north along Highway 1, hugging the edge where the California coastline plunges into the Pacific. Inside the car sits Chris Urmson and Anthony Lewandowski. To their right, a sheer cliff drops to the rocks below. The stakes for this road test are higher, an escalation of the short trips they've been doing with their autonomous car for the past few months. Urmson keeps his hands an inch from the wheel, jaw tight. Lewandowski grins like a kid at a roller coaster launch. Relax. It's only our lives on the line that's supposed to make me less nervous. Behind them, in a human driven car, a teammate hunches over a laptop, monitoring live readings from the Prius, ready to remotely adjust its position if the software drifts off course. But staying in lane is only part of the challenge. The Prius's onboard LIDAR scans cliffs, guardrails and passing traffic, building a three dimensional map of everything around them. Then the computers beneath it turn all of this data into judgments, like when to brake, when to steer, and when to trust the road. The Prius speeds towards a blind bend. Urmson's fingers twitch, anticipating the break, but nothing happens. Then the car slams to a stop. So late. It pitches both men forward against their belts. Oof. A little eager on the timing, don't you think? Levandowski grins. Hey, at least it noticed the cliff. With the bend tackled, the Prius surges forward again, reaches the next curve, and breaks just as abruptly. It's a ride that's jerky, unnerving and miraculous. For all the lurching, the robot never crosses the line. The ride is rough but resolute. By 2011, the Project Chauffeur team has met the Larry 1K Challenge, logging 1,000 miles of complex autonomous driving across California. True to his word, Google co founder Larry Page pays huge bonuses to the engineers who made it happen. But instead of settling down, their ambitions only expand. And no one's more than Lewandowski, whose experiments with an autonomous motorbike have now made him a millionaire. Lewandowski is convinced the future is now theirs to build. And he believes God, Google's caution is slowing them down. In his view, the technology is ready for deployment. The endless legal interventions and internal reviews are only slowing down the arrival of the driverless future. He starts thinking about breaking away to form a new company. One that can move fast, raise outside money, and get driverless cars on the road before the rest of the world even realizes what's happening. But there's a big problem. Everything they've built so far belongs to Google. If Lewandowski leaves, he can't take any of it with him. But in his mind, that's a mere technicality. They can rebuild from the ground up, using what they've learned. What matters is speed. And arriving first. Lewandowski approaches the team's senior engineers to test the waters. Some are tempted by the idea of breaking away from Google. Others are wary. Then he speaks with Chris Urmson. Lewandowski pitches his plan as liberation, a chance to escape Google's bureaucracy and bring a product to market. Urmson listens, then rejects the offer. He doesn't just disagree agree with the plan, he disagrees with Lewandowski's entire philosophy. For Urmson, self driving technology is just too consequential to rush. One fatal mistake and the entire field could lose public trust before it even takes off. At first, the tension is ideological. Speed versus safety. But soon it becomes personal. To incentivize Lewandowski, Larry Page had offered him a significantly larger share in the bonus program that's meant to reward him for the crucial mapping and hardware work that made the tests possible. Urmson naturally sees it differently. He feels the people who built the brains of the system, the code that actually drives the car, deserve more. The imbalance begins to eat at him. Pay attention to this kind of tension, because you know what? It kills more companies than bad products do. You've probably seen this before yourself. You got the cowboy who wants to move fast and break things, and the sheriff who wants to stick to the rules and play it safe. In the early days of a startup, you need the cowboy to get off the ground. But as you scale, you need the sheriff to keep things together. When these two personalities stop balancing each other and start resenting each other, well, that's often when the wheels come off. By 2015, the project is increasingly defined by tension With Lewandowski pushing for speed and Urmson pushing for caution, their philosophies diverge and the team begins to feel the strain. Foreign. It's May 2014 and Google's secretive self driving project is ready to roll into the spotlight. At the code conference in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California, journalists, investors and the tech elite crowd into an auditorium. On stage, Google co founder Sergey Brin smiles as a small car rolls onto the stage beside him. It's the first fully functional prototype of Google's self driving car. Named Firefly, it's a bubble shaped two seater with no steering wheel and no pedal. It looks more Lego than Lamborghini, but it represents a revolution, a vehicle that doesn't need drivers. Brin talks up the car's potential. This is not just a science problem project. It's the future of urban transportation. Imagine a fleet of autonomous taxis all summoned with the tap of a smartphone app. In the crowd, Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, listens and seethes. Google is one of Uber's biggest investors. Its mapping data powers Uber's app. Kalanick has considered reducing costs by removing the driver from Uber's business model. But it's always been a long term dream, not an immediate goal. Until now, Uber's focus has been on pure expansion. City launches, regulatory battles, fundraising. But now, on stage, Brin is describing a world where Uber isn't needed at all. When the applause fades, Kalanick has already made up his mind. If Google is coming for his business, he's going to fight back. Within a year, Uber poaches dozens of robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon University to found a new Advanced Technologies Group in Pittsburgh. Its mission? To build Uber's own driverless car and beat Google to the streets. Uber isn't alone. Tesla is touting the addition of an autopilot mode to its electric vehicles. General Motors and Ford are investing in their own driverless car projects. And Amazon is testing delivery drones. The race that began as a hapless romantic dash across the desert is now a global arms race. As companies compete for data, talent and control of the world's roads. The engineers inside Google's project chauffeur lab are no longer just building a driver. They're building a competitor. It's October 2014, and the spotlight is about to shift away from Google. On stage at Hawthorne Airport in Los Angeles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveils a new feature.
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Elon Musk
There's something else which so we've been able to accelerate autopilot and bring it to market faster than originally anticipated.
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Narrator
It's a new feature called Autopilot hardware that will be installed in all new Tesla cars. And Musk claims it represents a major leap toward a driverless future. Autopilot doesn't mean Tesla's car can drive itself from start to finish. But the car can stay in its lane, adjust its speed using adaptive cruise control and brake automatically. It's really a sophisticated driver assistance system. The system allows for hands off moments, but the law doesn't. Drivers are expected to keep their hands on the wheel and be ready to take over instantly. Musk's words highlight his confidence in this project.
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Elon Musk
We've got a whole bunch of cars ready for you to take a test ride in and I think you're really going to enjoy it. This is like an amusement park ride.
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Narrator
Google's engineers watch closely. To some, Tesla's announcement isn't a revolution so much as a shortcut. Autopilot relies on cameras, radar and software tweaks bolted onto existing production cars. It's a clever use of what's already there. But to some members of Google's self driving team, Autopilot is dangerous, limited and a pale imitation of true autonomy. Their own system, built on LIDAR sensors, high definition maps and full environmental modeling, is designed to replace the driver entirely. Tesla's system, they think, just pretends to. Which is what worries them. Because if Tesla markets a partial system as self driving, well, it's only a matter of time before someone misuses it. And when that crash comes, it could set the entire industry back years. It's one year later and the tension inside Google's self driving division has reached its breaking point. Officially, Project Chauffeur is thriving. But behind the glass walls, the mood has soured beyond repair. Anthony Levandowski wants to move faster. He believes the team has spent too long perfecting prototypes. Instead of putting real cars on the road. Outside Google, Tesla's Autopilot is stealing headlines and clocking millions of semi autonomous miles. Uber, General Motors and Ford are all building their own driverless programs. Lewandowski feels Google is losing ground. And he's not waiting for permission to act. He's founded a new company, OdinWave, a startup that's developing its own lidar sensors, the laser eyes at the heart of Google's self driving vehicles. Lewandowski and insists this work is separate from Google, but the overlap is obvious. He's also trying to get his colleagues at Project Chauffeur to join him. When word reaches Chris Urmson, it's the final straw for Urmson. Levandowski's moonlighting isn't just disloyal. It's a direct threat to Google's most sensitive technology. He fires off an email to Google HR urging that Levandowski be removed from the project immediately. The partnership at the heart of Google's self driving revolution is broken. And before the year is over, one move will set off a chain reaction that will drag Google, Uber and the entire industry into open warfare. It's a bright autumn morning in Austin, Texas, in the fall of 2015. On a quiet suburban street, a small white pod shaped car comes to life. There's no steering wheel, no pedals, no driver's seat at all. Just two passenger chairs, a button marked start and a circular roof mount dome packed with sensors. It looks a little like a toy police car, or perhaps a dangerous giant smiling golf cart. But what it's about to do is anything but child's play. Until now, state laws required a licensed driver to sit behind the wheel even in a robot car. But Texas is different. In 2015, the state has no laws restricting autonomous vehicles, which means Google can legally run its Firefly prototype without a human driver. And in a display of confidence, Google decides its test passenger will be Steve mahan, who is 95% blind. He has volunteered to help Google prove its technology is finally ready for the civilian world by becoming the first person ever to take a fully autonomous ride on public roads. The route is short, a few miles through neighborhood neighborhood streets at under 25 miles an hour. But the car performs flawlessly. The Firefly brakes gently at crossings, signals its turns and pulls smoothly to the curb at Mahan's destination. For Mahan, the trip represents much more than a technological novelty. It offers the freedom to go where he wants without having to depend on public transportation. Transportation or a driver. In Mountain View, engineers crowd around live feeds from Austin, cheering as the car completes its route. It's a milestone, years in the making and proof that their cautious, methodical approach works. No stunts, no safety driver, no drama. Just a smooth, perfect ride. For a moment, at least, the future of driving looks bright. It's after dark at Google's Mountain View campus. The hallways are silent. Most of the engineers have gone home. For months, Anthony Lewandowski has argued with his bosses, fought with colleagues, and watched as his dream of commercializing self driving cars has drifted further out of his control. Now he's reached a decision. He double checks he's not being watched, then slides a portable external hard drive into his workstation. On the screen, directories flick open lidar schematics Circuit designs, calibration data, proprietary mapping files. He drags the documents onto his hard drive line by line. Gigabytes of confidential data from Project Chauffeur begin to copy over roughly 14,000 files, including instructions for calibrating and tuning Google's custom LiDAR. Levandowski watches the progress bar inch forward, his eyes darting to the door. When it's done, he ejects the drive, pockets it, and powers down his monitor. A few days later, Levandowski returns to collect more files. The next month, he resigns. He tells his teammates he's leaving to start a new company, Otto, a self driving truck startup. But the data he just copied will soon ignite one of the biggest corporate showdowns in Silicon Valley history. In August 2016, Uber buys Otto just 10 months after Lewandowski started the business. The deal is reportedly worth $680 million, and Uber doesn't waste any time proving the commercial potential of its new acquisition. A few months later, Uber makes the world's first autonomous truck delivery by transporting 50,000 cans of Budweiser 120 miles. Inside Google's self driving team, jaws drop. Levandowski has barely walked out the door, and now he's joined their biggest rival, taking the expertise he helped build with him. For Uber's CEO, Travis Kalanick, buying auto is a masterstroke. Google may have the science, but Uber has the market share. And now, thanks to Lewandowski, it has the brains too. For Google, it's a gut punch. Its prodigy has crossed the aisle and given a leg up to the very company racing against them. Let's look at the strategy here. Uber is late to the party, and they know it. They have two spend five years trying to build this technology from scratch or write a massive check to buy the team that already knows how to do it. This is the classic buy versus build calculation. Travis Kalanick figures that in a winner takes all, market time is actually more expensive than cash. So he didn't just buy a truck company. He basically bought himself a time machine to try and catch up with Google. Two months later, in a sleek glass auditorium at Google hq, a new face steps on stage. John Krafczyk, a former Hyundai executive, adjusts his microphone and smiles at the packed room of journalists behind him. One word fills the giant screen. Waymo. Over the past year, Google's self driving project has changed its shape and personnel. First, Lewandowski left to start Otto. A few months later, Chris Urmson left Google as well. Now the project is changing its name as the experiment finally becomes a business kraftcheck tells reporters the team is spinning out from Google as a standalone company. Waymo will still be owned by Google's Alphabet, but it will have its own identity and mission. The new name, he explains, means a new way forward in mobility. After a decade of research research, Google's Moonshot has finally reached its destination. Waymo is ready to bring Robotaxis to the streets, but it won't have the road to itself because Uber, armed with Otto and Anthony Lewandowski, has just pulled into the fast lane. The collision course between the two companies is about to be foreign. This is Episode one of Waymo and the Rise of the Robo Taxis for Business Wars. A quick note about the recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said, those scenes or dramatizations, but they're based on research and we've used many sources for this season, including Autonomy by Lawrence Burns and driven by Alex Davies. I'm your host David Brown. Our story was written by Simon Parkin of Yellow End research by David Walensky, sound design by Josh Morales. Kyle Randall is our lead sound designer. Fact checking by Gabrielle Drollet. Our producer is Tristan Donovan of Yellow Ann. Our managing producer is Desi Blalock. Our senior producers are Jenny Bloom and Emily Frost. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Our executive producers are are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Louie. For wondering.