Autonomy: The Quest To Build the Driverless Car—And How It Will Reshape Our World

Burns (Reinventing the Automobile), former VP of research and development at General Motors and current consultant for Google's Waymo spin-off, offers a compelling, if one-sided, history of how three developments have converged to place us on the cusp of a revolution in personal mobility. The first set of technologies are sensors, GPS-based mapping, and artificial intelligence that allow for autonomous or self-driving vehicles. Spurred by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) challenge competitions with million-dollar prizes, these capabilities are now being incorporated into high-end vehicles on public roads. The second are advances in electric vehicles that drastically reduce the mechanical complexity and cost of vehicles and their environmental impact. Lastly, ride-sharing services such as Lyft, Uber, and Car2Go are paving the way for personal transportation as a service, potentially lowering vehicle ownership rates and increasing efficiency by eliminating downtime from empty or parked vehicles. Burns envisions the confluence as radically impacting city design, safety, work schedules, pollution, and the economy, changes he views as inevitable and creating new service industries.