TED2011
Sebastian Thrun: Google's driverless car
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Sebastian Thrun helped build Google's amazing driverless car, powered by a very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheel, and dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go.
Sebastian Thrun - Educator, entrepreneur
Sebastian Thrun is a passionate technologist who is constantly looking for new opportunities to make the world better for all of us. Full bio
Sebastian Thrun is a passionate technologist who is constantly looking for new opportunities to make the world better for all of us. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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As a boy,
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I loved cars.
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When I turned 18,
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I lost my best friend to a car accident.
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Like this.
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And then I decided I'd dedicate my life
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to saving one million people
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every year.
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Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report,
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but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.
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I saw the concept first
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in the DARPA Grand Challenges
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where the U.S. government issued a prize
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to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert.
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And even though a hundred teams were there,
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these cars went nowhere.
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So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car.
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We built the hardware and the software.
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We made it learn from us,
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and we set it free in the desert.
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And the unimaginable happened:
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it became the first car
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to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge,
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winning Stanford 2 million dollars.
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Yet I still hadn't saved a single life.
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Since, our work has focused
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on building driving cars
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that can drive anywhere by themselves --
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any street in California.
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We've driven 140,000 miles.
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Our cars have sensors
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by which they magically can see
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everything around them
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and make decisions
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about every aspect of driving.
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It's the perfect driving mechanism.
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We've driven in cities,
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like in San Francisco here.
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We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.
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We've encountered joggers,
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busy highways, toll booths,
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and this is without a person in the loop;
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the car just drives itself.
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In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles,
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people didn't even notice.
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Mountain roads,
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day and night,
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and even crooked Lombard Street
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in San Francisco.
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(Laughter)
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Sometimes our cars get so crazy,
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they even do little stunts.
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(Video) Man: Oh, my God.
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What?
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Second Man: It's driving itself.
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Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life,
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but I can do something for all the people who died.
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Do you know that driving accidents
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are the number one cause of death for young people?
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And do you realize that almost all of those
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are due to human error
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and not machine error,
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and can therefore be prevented by machines?
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Do you realize
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that we could change the capacity of highways
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by a factor of two or three
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if we didn't rely on human precision
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on staying in the lane --
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improve body position
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and therefore drive a little bit closer together
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on a little bit narrower lanes,
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and do away with all traffic jams on highways?
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Do you realize that you, TED users,
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spend an average
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of 52 minutes per day
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in traffic,
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wasting your time
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on your daily commute?
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You could regain this time.
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This is four billion hours
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wasted in this country alone.
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And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted.
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Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology,
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and I'm really looking forward to a time
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when generations after us look back at us
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and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Sebastian Thrun - Educator, entrepreneurSebastian Thrun is a passionate technologist who is constantly looking for new opportunities to make the world better for all of us.
Why you should listen
Sebastian Thrun is an educator, entrepreneur and troublemaker. After a long life as a professor at Stanford University, Thrun resigned from tenure to join Google. At Google, he founded Google X, home to self-driving cars and many other moonshot technologies. Thrun also founded Udacity, an online university with worldwide reach, and Kitty Hawk, a "flying car" company. He has authored 11 books, 400 papers, holds 3 doctorates and has won numerous awards.
Sebastian Thrun | Speaker | TED.com