- In January 2016, autonomous car engineer Anthony Levandowski left Google and went to Uber, where CEO Travis Kalanick was eager to produce his own robot taxi.
- Levandowski was removed from Google in favor of Chris Urmson, his former roommate and longtime rival.
- Years of internal strife and indecision within the Google team – largely centered on Levandowski and Urmson – have left the search giant vulnerable to competitors. But Uber’s own effort was condemned for its own shortcomings.
- This story is adapted from Insider’s senior editor Alex Davies’ new book, “Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car”, which chronicles the chaotic and confusing creation of the autonomous driving industry as we know it today.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
On January 7, 2016, Anthony Levandowski sent an email to Larry Page to wish him a happy new year and to complain, once again, about the state of the search giant’s autonomous car research project.
“The driver is broken,” wrote Levandowski, using the code name for the effort he helped launch. “We are rapidly losing our technological advantage.”
His team spent seven years and billions of dollars, but did not produce anything close to a commercial product. He and some comrades thought Chris Urmson, who had beaten Levandowski for controlling the team, was very prudent in deploying his technology and blamed him for letting Google’s rivals catch up with them.
The team’s problems, however, went far beyond Urmson’s cautious worldview. As the project progressed from research to development, disagreements over how to market your work – along with who would be in charge and who would receive the biggest bonus – threatened to leave you vulnerable to competitors.
Two of the team’s founding members, Levandowski and Urmson, were at the center of the fight. With his ability to launch ambitious projects with remarkable speed and his disregard for how things are usually done, Levandowski summed up the Silicon Valley disruptor. Urmson was more of an academic, not wanting to release something he wasn’t sure was completely safe. Google’s leaders felt that each offered a valuable skill set. But this was not Abraham Lincoln’s “rival team”, overcoming their differences to help preserve the Union and win the Civil War. It was more like war itself, where every topic of discussion could be turned into a debate, a discussion, a shouting laden with profanity.
Key members of the Google autonomous team included Chris Urmson, on the far left, and Levandowski, on the far right.
Courtesy of David Goldwater
Levandowski, Urmson and their companions managed to find casus belli in less important places, such as the types of buttons the car must have. Some wanted two buttons: green to activate the system, red to disable. Others thought it would be simpler to have just one to turn on and off. They discussed whether to add new buttons or redirect those already in the car. They discussed how to display the speed the driver set for the vehicle, either as the absolute number (say, 70 mph) or as a speed limit offset (65 + 5).
“We argued about the stupidest things and lost a lot of time,” driver engineer Don Burnette said in an interview. “How impactful or significant was that discussion about the button in retrospect? It was a complete waste of time.”
Time they didn’t have. In 2016, Uber’s standalone research team was on the heels of Google, and CEO Travis Kalanick was desperate to close the gap.
On January 27, Levandowski sent an email to Page again. “I want to be in the driver’s seat, not in the passenger seat, and now [it] it looks like I’m in the trunk, “he wrote. He was leaving alone, he said, with a truck he drives alone. What he didn’t say is that Uber had already agreed to buy his startup, and that in a few months, he would be executing Kalanick’s autonomous effort – with disastrous consequences.
When Urmson heard the news later that day, he showed no sign of hesitation. He marched with Levandowski to his table and made him pack his things. He then led the 6’6 “engineer out of the freelance office and into the” public “side of the building and placed him in a conference room. Then he called the human resources department to discuss the details of the resignation. of the man who was alternately his competitor, his teammate, his roommate and his main rival in a world they helped create.
This story was adapted from Insider’s senior editor Alex Davies’ new book, “Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car”. Davies interviewed more than 120 people and spent years mapping the complicated evolution of the autonomous auto industry, a history filled with technological advances, theft of trade secrets, stupid t-shirts and more.