Sebastian Thrun Quotes

Google was the right place to pioneer robot cars.

The self-driving car revolution was kicked off by The 'DARPA' Grand Challenge to make an autonomous car traverse 132 mi. of a desert.

The Jetsons had them in the 1960s. They were the defining element of 'Knight Rider' in the 1980s: cars that drive themselves. Self-driving cars appear in countless science fiction movies. By Hollywood standards, they are so normal we don't even notice them. But in real life, they still don't exist. What if you could buy one today?

Some Google employees have their self-driving vehicles take them to work. These car robots don't look like something from 'The Jetsons'; the driverless features on these cars are a bunch of sensors, wires, and software. This technology 'works.'

We're doing a lot of work on self-driving cars. We do not currently have cars in the U.S., but we plan to, for development and testing. I think we are within striking distance of making self-driving cars a reality, and these would be powered by deep learning.

The energy that's going into autonomous vehicles is very significant, and we expect to continue to invest there.

All the technology going into self-driving cars is robotic technology. It's not automotive. That explains why some of the traditional automotive players didn't develop this technology.

Did Google need to make robot cars in order to make Streetview work? Absolutely not. It's the equivalent of saying you need a walking robot in order to push an upright vacuum cleaner. It's gratuitous robotics!

Even as a college professor at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I saw myself as an entrepreneur, and I went out, took risks, and tried to invent new things, such as participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge and working on self-driving cars.

Google's founders have had a good eye for imagining what technologies will be significant in the near future. No one asked Google to develop self-driving cars, but it helped them with street views for Google Maps.

Eventually, all cars are going to be autonomous.

If Uber wants to catch up to Google and be the leader in autonomy, we have to have the best minds. We have to have all the great minds.

I'm a firm believer that autonomous driving is coming.

I think it's very clear now that we will have self-driving cars.

Driverless cars are a great thing.

My opinion is it's a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.

It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

The first autonomous cars date back to the late 20th century. But recent increases in sophistication and reductions in cost - reflected, for example, in cheap LIDAR systems, which can 'see' a street in 3D in a way similar to that of the human eye - are now bringing autonomous cars closer to the market.

If we want to help Google become something meaningfully different in the future, then that's more likely to happen if we focus on the physical world instead.

Google has already tested robot cars in San Francisco. If they can navigate San Francisco, they can probably manage just about anywhere.

Today, there are industries employing hundreds of thousands of engineers creating artificial intelligence.

I'm not so keen on letting my car drive itself.

When you start to automate, you start to do the self-driving thing, you make it much more efficient. When these cars go into self-driving, you start to become a robotics company.

There is huge demand for artificial intelligence technologies.

Robots... I think that is a hot topic.