zzdcar
Home
/
Reviews
/
Tech
/
We Can Now Watch Google's Secret Self-Driving Cars From 2009
We Can Now Watch Google's Secret Self-Driving Cars From 2009-May 2024
2024-02-19 EST 22:10:32

Image for article titled We Can Now Watch Google's Secret Self-Driving Cars From 2009

Google announced . Many years and one death at the hands of rival Uber later, we can finally see 2009's testing footage.

Waymo, the , and sent over the footage for us to show you, along with an explanatory blurb:

In early 2009, when Waymo was first founded as the “Google Self-Driving Car Project,” Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page challenged our first engineers to drive autonomously without human intervention or disengagements along ten challenging 100-mile routes in our home state of California. By December 2009, the team had completed their first route, and nine months later in mid 2010, we had wrapped up the last.

The Google project always felt strange from even before it began. It rose up from the Stanford team that won the big DARPA prize for autonomous driving. Perhaps no great surprise that Eric Schmidt, who ran Google at this time, . Love a good collaboration between the military and an under-regulated tech sector on building intelligent robots in secret!

The Pentagon announced an unusual new program calling for hackers to test its digital security…

For a good time I went back and looked up our coverage of the early days of Google’s self-driving car project. Before it was even announced, .

Several short years later, and it’s .

A U.S. agency finds Uber’s self-driving software that led to the fatal Arizona crash last year had…

In any case, please enjoy watching these videos of unsuspecting drivers doing unwitting testing with a developing robot.

Comments
Welcome to zzdcar comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
Tech
Apple Car's 'Target Ship Date' Is 2019, Whatever That Means
Apple Car's 'Target Ship Date' Is 2019, Whatever That Means
We know Apple is working on an autonomous electric car. We don’t know pretty much everything else about it. But now, according to a report, we know its “target ship date” is just four years away. It’s not clear whether Apple actually wants to make a car that consumers will...
May 27, 2026
That Buzzfeed Article About Autonomous Cars Is Stupid Trolling Bullshit And Here's Why
That Buzzfeed Article About Autonomous Cars Is Stupid Trolling Bullshit And Here's Why
A couple of days ago, a Buzzfeed writer got a ride in one of Google’s autonomous koala-cars and got an erection so powerful that it drew enough blood from his brain to cause him to have a mild stroke that turned him into some sort of inane troll. At least,...
May 27, 2026
Intel Outlines The Ways Your Car Can Be Hacked
Intel Outlines The Ways Your Car Can Be Hacked
Intel, the manufacturer of the majority of chips and processors included in most personal computers on sale today, have now started investigating and developing new methods of hack-proofing automobiles. Software security is for automakers with new technologies filling our cars in today’s market, and it’s one more headache for the...
May 27, 2026
Frankfurt Was A Show About The Future Of Big Ideas
Frankfurt Was A Show About The Future Of Big Ideas
As the dies down and we all sleep easy at night with dreams of a Montecarlo Blue Alfa Romeo Giulia, I thought we could process some of the big ideas a lot of automakers hinted at with this year’s show. Outside of the obvious electric future we’re all silently and...
May 27, 2026
How Science Fiction Failed Us: The Real Future Of Autonomous Cars
How Science Fiction Failed Us: The Real Future Of Autonomous Cars
Elon Musk believes in it. So does Uber’s Travis Kalanick. The Autonomotive Singularity is inevitable. It is the enemy of enthusiast car culture as it stands, but only as we know it. If we come to understand it, it might just be the best thing ever for car enthusiasts....
May 27, 2026
Now Your Insurance Company Wants To Spy On You In Your Car
Now Your Insurance Company Wants To Spy On You In Your Car
Allstate, the second largest insurer in the U.S., has found new ways of monitoring what you do in your car, including everything from the volume of your stereo to the people you ride with. The new patent discovered on August 11th, titled “Traffic-based Driving Analysis” according to the , details...
May 27, 2026
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.zzdcar.com All Rights Reserved