Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car - And How It Will Reshape Our World
Written by Lawrence Burns
Narrated by George Newbern
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
’A fascinating hybrid. Part freewheeling history of the rise of the modern autonomous vehicle, part intimate memoir from an insider who was on the front lines for much of that history, Autonomy will more than bring readers up to speed on one of today’s most closely watched technologies’ Brian Merchant, author of The One Device
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 not own automobiles, but will travel instead in driverless electric vehicles summoned at the touch of an app. We will be liberated from driving, so that the time we spend in cars can be put to more productive use. We will prevent more than 90 percent of car crashes, provide freedom of mobility to the elderly and disabled and decrease our dependence on fossil fuels.
Autonomy tells the story of the maverick engineers and computer experts who triggered the revolution. Lawrence Burns – long-time adviser to the Google self-driving car project (now Waymo) and former corporate vice president of research, development and planning at 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-dollar purse 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 a prediction of the future – the ultimate guide to understanding the driverless car and to navigating the revolution it has sparked.
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Reviews for Autonomy
8 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A look at the development of self-driving cars and the possibilities for disruptive but ultimately beneficial changes that society will likely experience as we switch over from human-driven, gas-guzzling, privately owned vehicles to autonomous electric ones that people hire only when they need them.It's an interesting topic, and I agree with author Lawrence Burns that it's one that's likely to have a huge effect on all our futures. (One that can't come soon enough, if you ask me, because I really hate driving.) But my interest levels in the book itself were a bit variable. It doesn't start off very promisingly, I'm afraid, with a long section covering the DARPA races of the mid-2000s that I found surprisingly unsatisfying, as it glossed over a lot of the technical details I was interested in without being terribly successful at turning it into an exciting human-interest story instead.Fortunately, much of the rest of it worked better for me, although it never did get as much into the technical side of things as I was hoping. For me, the software engineering is one of the most interesting aspects of this subject. But, although I did find the chapter devoted to the testing of Google's automated vehicles one the most engaging parts of the book, it really only scratched the surface of the technical challenges involved.That may not be too surprising, though, as Burns is a businessman, not a technical guy, although his career, unusually, has encompassed both Detroit and Silicon Valley and has perhaps even involved a sort of synthesis of the two. So he includes a lot of detail about the business side of things and the personalities involved and how different companies have taken different approaches. Sometimes a little more than I quite wanted, to be honest, and his position probably isn't entirely unbiased. But he's very, very knowledgeable about all of this, and he has a very clear vision of the future that I think is both realistic and worthwhile.So, even if this isn't entirely the book I was hoping it would be, I'd say it is definitely worth reading if this is a subject you're interested in.