Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car - And How It Will Reshape Our World

From the ultimate insider – a former General Motors executive and current advisor to the Google Self-Driving Car project – comes the definitive story of the race between Google, Tesla and Uber to create the driverless car.

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution. In the near future, most of us will notown automobiles, but will travel instead in driverless electric vehicles summoned at thetouch of an app. We will be liberated from driving, so that the time we spend in cars can beput to more productive use. We will prevent more than 90 percent of car crashes, providefreedom of mobility to the elderly and disabled and decrease our dependence on fossilfuels.

Autonomy tells the story of the maverick engineers and computer experts who triggeredthe revolution. Lawrence Burns – long-time adviser to the Google self-driving car project(now Waymo) and former corporate vice president of research, development and planningat General Motors – provides the perfectly timed history of how we arrived at this point, in a character-driven and vivid account of the unlikely thinkers who accomplished what billion-dollar automakers never dared.

Beginning at a 2004 off-road robot race across the Mojave Desert with a million-dollarpurse and continuing up to the current stampede to develop driverless technology,Autonomy is a page-turning chronicle of the past, a diagnosis of the present and aprediction of the future – the ultimate guide to understanding the driverless car and tonavigating the revolution it has sparked.