The head of the Stanford DARPA Grand Challenge (Sebastian Thrun) left his tenured professorship at Stanford to work at Google. The hobbyist/university teams ar

The head of the Stanford DARPA Grand Challenge (Sebastian Thrun) left his tenured professorship at Stanford to work at Google. The hobbyist/university teams are an excellent staging ground to get started; but any other company could have put in the investment that Google did. I would have loved to have seen a CMU/Red Whittaker/GM collaboration. It would have made for a poetic little "revive the rust belt with the robot car industry" story too. Given the response to the Detroit Superbowl Chrysler ad, looks like the public love that sort of story...