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Few people work on cars that drive more than Chris Urmson alone. Urmson played a key role in Carnegie Mellon’s team in all three DARPA challenges between 2004 and 2007. He then led Google’s auto-driving project for several years. Urmson left Google after being promoted to CEO of the spin-off company that became Waymo.
“I led and built that team and, in all respects, I’ve been managing it for years,” Urmson told Bloomberg in an interview Thursday. “Of course I wanted to run the program.”
Bloomberg asked Urmson about Tesla autopilot technology – and especially about Elon Musk’s claim that Tesla vehicles will soon be able to function as driverless taxis.
“It just won’t happen,” Urmson said. “Technically it’s very impressive what they did, but we did better in 2010.”
This is a reference to Urmson’s time at Google. Google began recruiting DARPA Grand Challenge veterans around 2009. In a few years, Google engineers built a self-driving basic car capable of navigating a variety of roads in the San Francisco Bay Area.
A few years later, Google began allowing employees to use experimental cars with autopilot to drive on the highway – an application similar to today’s autopilot. Google has considered licensing this technology to automakers for driving on the highway. But technology requires active driver supervision. Urmson and other Google engineers have ruled that there is a high risk that drivers will become overly dependent on technology and not monitor it properly, leading to unnecessary deaths.
No time to waste
After leaving Google, Urmson co-founded the Aurora startup with two other prominent self-governing executives. Former autopilot chief Sterling Anderson reportedly left Tesla in 2015 after confronting Elon Musk for Musk’s aggressive timeline for developing full driving technology. Drew Bagnell was a senior member of Uber’s auto-driving project.
At the end of last year, Uber sold that project to Aurora, more than doubling Aurora’s workforce and consolidating Aurora’s status as the largest independent startup that remains independent.
In recent years, Aurora has focused on long-distance transportation as its first commercial product. Urmson predicted to Bloomberg that Aurora will be the first company to implement autonomous driving technology for long-distance transportation routes on a “significant” commercial scale.
But the Uber deal could make Aurora a competitor in self-driving taxi business. Not only has Aurora absorbed dozens of engineers with experience in this field, but a close relationship with Uber will give Aurora an easy way to expand once its technology is ready.
At the same time, Aurora’s swollen herd of 1,600 souls puts Urmson under great pressure. Right now, most of Aurora’s rivals are mostly owned by huge companies – either car companies like General Motors and Ford, or technology companies like Alphabet and Amazon. These companies can continue to invest money in self-driving technology for as long as it takes for them to work.
But Aurora doesn’t have a parent company with infinitely deep pockets. So if Aurora can’t bring a product to market soon, it will have to raise extra money in addition to the more than $ 1 billion it has already raised.
“Urmson doesn’t shy away from the possibility that the company may need to raise more money,” Bloomberg reports. “And he’s confident he could do that.”
Of course, that’s what any startup CEO will tell you. But the reality is that investors are volatile. If Aurora is unable to demonstrate substantial progress towards a viable commercial product, it may not be able to raise another round of funding. This seems to have been the fate of Zoox, a promising startup that was forced to sell to Amazon at a selling price last year.