San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Full speed ahead
Detroit and Silicon Valley need each other to make selfdriving cars a reality, bring mobility to those who can’t drive and banish traffic accidents to the bloody past.
Both sides get that, now. They didn’t always. Lawrence D. Burns watched their rocky courtship up close. The former vice president of research at General Motors, he later became a consultant to Google’s self-driving car project, now known as Waymo. His unique position — essentially, a trusted confidant to two squabbling suitors — may make his book, “Autonomy,” the definitive history of this new industry’s birth.
Despite spending more than three decades at GM, Burns was never quite a “car guy,” his term for Detroit executives who live for the roar of a rumbling engine encased in chrome. Indeed, he considered our current transportation system ridiculously inefficient and was constantly exploring new technologies — fuel cells, electric drivetrains, personal mobility pods — that could improve it.
So when the federal government, at the beginning of the century, started organizing races for self-driving vehicles, Burns couldn’t help but notice. The DARPA Grand Challenges — named after the military research agency that sponsored them — introduced Burns to many of the young engineers who would, within a decade, create the autonomous car industry. Burns and coauthor Christopher Shulgan wisely focus more on these brilliant and sometimes flawed young men than on Burns himself, who steps in and out of the story as needed.
Autonomy
The Quest to Build the Driverless Car — And How It Will Reshape Our World Bay Area readers who have seen their streets become test tracks for self-driving vehicles will recognize many of the names.
There’s Sebastian Thrun, a German roboticist who, while teaching at Stanford, developed Google’s Street View feature, then founded the company’s self-driving research effort. There’s Chris Urmson, an amiable, straightforward Canadian who enters the story as a Carnegie Mellon University student building robot SUVs for the DARPA races, then gets hired by Thrun to spearhead the Google project. And there’s Anthony Levandowski, another DARPA-race veteran who clashed with Urmson at Google, joined rival Uber and triggered a high-profile lawsuit between the two tech giants.
Burns, to his advantage, doesn’t try to be objective. He admires the intellect and intensity of these young obsessives, their willingness to work awful hours in pursuit of a goal that might not be attainable. And Burns gives his personal take on each. He likes, for example, Urmson’s steady, nonflashy personality and approach.
“Urmson is not the guy you’re going to notice first when you walk into a room,” Burns and Shulgan write. “But you spend enough time with the people in that room, and I don’t care who is in there, after a while Urmson will be the guy you trust to lead — to carry out the plan.”
At the same time, Burns is quite willing to point out flaws, both among Silicon Valley’s self-driving engineers and his former colleagues in Detroit.
Despite a clear fondness for GM, his critique of the company and its auto-industry peers can be unsparing. Dominated by bean counters and car guys, the companies long held an unshakeable assumption that the future of mobility had one solution — the gasoline-burning car, steered by a human who liked to drive.
The possibilities that so intrigued Burns tended to scare them. He describes visiting, in 2005, a facility where GM completely disassembled competitors’ cars down to the last bolt, to see how they were put together. One of the company’s engineers working on an electric vehicle showed Burns and then-CEO Rick Wagoner a disassembled EV, which had perhaps one-tenth as many parts as a comparable gaspowered car. Wagoner instantly grasped the implications for an industry whose business model relied on being able to assemble complicated machines en masse. If cars were easier to make, Detroit could face a lot more competition.
“What you’re showing me,” Rick said slowly, “spells the end to the integrated auto industry as we know it.”
Burns can be equally harsh with the engineers at Google. He describes in detail the tension between Urmson and Levandowski, who Burns says was angling for Urmson’s leadership job. The situation grew so strained that by 2011, Thrun decided he had to fire one of the two, and he asked Burns which it should be. Burns helped negotiate a truce, but he makes clear his own distrust of Levandowski, saying, “I found it difficult to take Levandowski at his word.”
Palo Alto’s Tesla doesn’t figure prominently in “Autonomy.” And when Burns finally turns his attention to the upstart automaker, his comments aren’t kind. He takes a dim view of Tesla’s semiautonomous Autopilot feature, which he considers inferior to Google/Waymo’s technology. And the way Tesla promoted the feature when it still had considerable drawbacks strikes him as “astonishingly reckless.”
“It was only a matter of time, we felt, before someone died in a crash that involved the Autopilot technology,” Burns wrote, describing a discussion within the Google team. Seven months after Tesla released Autopilot, a driver died on a Florida highway when his Model S, running in Autopilot mode, struck a truck.
“Can you imagine if the Google team had experienced a fatal crash seven months into its testing back in 2009?” Burns and Shulgan write. “Self-driving technology would have been dead on arrival.”
Despite false starts, traditional automakers and Silicon Valley companies formed alliances to advance self-driving cars. Each side realized the other had expertise it couldn’t easily duplicate. But knowing both sides well, Burns is convinced the revolution will happen in no small part due to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They realized the technology was possible, understood its potential to save lives, and poured money into its pursuit.
Would Detroit have done the same, without pressure from the outside? “It’s really hard for big companies to disrupt themselves,” Burns and Shulgan write. “The examples of companies that have done it well are rare.”
David R. Baker is a former San Francisco Chronicle staff writer who covered energ y, clean tech, electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com