Something no one seems to have mentioned: the post is by Sebastian Thrun, a professor at Stanford. His team won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and placed 2nd

Something no one seems to have mentioned: the post is by Sebastian Thrun, a professor at Stanford. His team won the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 and placed 2nd in the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007, so he's one of the most experienced people in the world in the field of autonomous driving. He's also done important work in robotics and mapping, two of the key skills needed for autonomous driving. I didn't realize he was also at Google now, but this is probably good news for everyone, since Google will likely support him better than DARPA could. Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge