Google staffs the self-driving project with DARPA Challenge veterans

Background

Much of the early practical experience in self-driving vehicles came out of a competition rather than a company. The DARPA Challenges were a series of autonomous vehicle races organized by the US government, in which teams built vehicles that had to complete a course without a person doing the driving ^[1]. The best-known result came in 2005, when the Stanford team led by Sebastian Thrun won the DARPA Grand Challenge with a vehicle called Stanley, driving autonomously over 132 miles in the desert and taking a 2 million dollar Pentagon prize ^[2]. A later edition, the 2007 Urban Challenge, was won by a team from Carnegie Mellon University ^[1].

Because the races set one course and one set of rules for everyone, they produced something unusual: a small, publicly comparable group of engineers who had actually made vehicles drive themselves, and whose work could be measured against each other.

What happened

In a 2010 post, Google said that to develop the technology it had gathered some of the very best engineers from the DARPA Challenges ^[1]. The people named in that post had been central to the races. Chris Urmson was the technical team leader of the Carnegie Mellon team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge ^[1]. Mike Montemerlo was the software lead for the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge ^[1]. Anthony Levandowski built the world's first autonomous motorcycle to participate in a DARPA Grand Challenge, and also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside ^[1].

The New York Times, describing the same 2010 project, noted that Thrun had led the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge with Stanley ^[2].

Who was actually in the cars

The team around those engineers was small. The New York Times reported that the 2010 project had a team of 15 engineers, and that Google hired more than a dozen people with spotless driving records to sit in the driver's seat, paying 15 dollars an hour or more ^[2]. That detail describes what the technology looked like at the time: the engineers were building the driving, while paid employees sat where a driver sits, in cars moving through ordinary traffic.

Why it matters

The hiring pattern is the point. A government-funded series of races had created a handful of people with hands-on experience of making a car drive itself, and a single company then brought many of them together in one team. Google also says that the work of these and other engineers on the team is on display in the National Museum of American History ^[1], which places the effort in a public record rather than only in company files.

Read together, the two accounts show a field that was still tiny in 2010 — a few dozen people, one of them paid by the hour to hold the wheel — and that drew directly on the results of the DARPA Challenges.