Autonomy

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. Autonomy blends a freewheeling history of autonomous vehicles with an intimate memoir from someone on the front lines of this revolution.

We stand on the brink of a technological transformation: in the near future, most people will no longer own cars but travel in driverless electric vehicles summoned with a tap. This shift promises to prevent over 90% of crashes, provide mobility for the elderly and disabled, reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and free up our time for more productive pursuits.

Lawrence Burns recounts the story of the maverick engineers and computer experts who made this future possible. Beginning with a 2004 off-road robot race across the Mojave Desert and continuing to today’s race to develop driverless technology, Autonomy is a vivid, character-driven chronicle of the past, a diagnosis of the present, and a guide to understanding—and navigating—the revolution of driverless cars.