On October 9, 2010, Google published a post on its official blog titled “What we’re driving at,” written by Sebastian Thrun, revealing a project that had been running in secret: cars that drive themselves. The post disclosed that the vehicles had already driven 140,000 miles on public roads, handling San Francisco’s hilly streets, the Golden Gate Bridge, busy highways, joggers, and toll booths, “with the car driving itself.”
Thrun framed the motivation in safety and efficiency terms - reducing the roughly 1.2 million road deaths worldwide each year, freeing up commuting time, and cutting carbon emissions through ride sharing and tighter “highway trains of tomorrow.” The cars were always staffed by a trained safety driver and a software operator during testing.
The project drew directly on the talent and techniques of the DARPA Grand Challenge. Thrun had led Stanford’s team to win the 2005 challenge, and the Google effort recruited engineers from the top DARPA teams. In effect, an academic desert race turned into a commercial program aimed at deploying autonomous driving at scale.
The announcement was the public starting line for what would become one of the most heavily funded efforts in autonomy. The project was later spun out of Google as Waymo in 2016.