Sebastian Thrun left Google 3 years ago, and had already been splitting his time between Google and Udacity 5 years ago. The article is talking about the recen

Sebastian Thrun left Google 3 years ago, and had already been splitting his time between Google and Udacity 5 years ago. The article is talking about the recent events leading up to a lawsuit, not the history of self-driving cars (in which case we'd have to go back to the 80's and Carnegie Mellon, where coincidentally Sebastian Thrun once worked as a researcher).