"Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on the same slightly surreal commute. He leaves his house in Berkeley at around eight o’clock, waves goodbye to his fiancée and their son, and drives to his office in Mountain View, forty-three miles away. The ride takes him over surface streets and freeways, old salt flats and pine-green foothills, across the gusty blue of San Francisco Bay, and down into the heart of Silicon Valley. In rush-hour traffic, it can take two hours, but Levandowski doesn’t mind. He thinks of it as research. While other drivers are gawking at him, he is observing them: recording their maneuvers in his car’s sensor logs, analyzing traffic flow, and flagging any problems for future review. The only tiresome part is when there’s roadwork or an accident ahead and the Lexus insists that he take the wheel. A chime sounds, pleasant yet insistent, then a warning appears on his dashboard screen: “In one mile, prepare to resume manual control.” - × × ×

“Cost is the least of my worries,” Sergey Brin had told me earlier. “Driving the price of technology down is like”—he snapped his fingers. “You just wait a month. It’s not fundamentally expensive.” Brin and his engineers are motivated by more personal concerns: Brin’s parents are in their late seventies and starting to get unsteady behind the wheel. Thrun lost his best friend to a car accident, and Urmson has children just a few years shy of driving age. Like everyone else at Google, they know the statistics: worldwide, car accidents kill 1.24 million people a year, and injure another fifty million.” - × × ×

Ну трун не зря с норвигом вел курсы по Self-driving cars. Наверняка нашли себе еще пачку студентов с интересными идеями. - социальный груффало