In 2007, Thrun then built the next version of his driverless cars which had cameras on them, allowing it to record 360 degrees of video. This sparked off the start of a well-known feature on Google Maps known as Street View.
“And we went to Google and said we’d love to help you build Street View. And we kind of ended up … felt like an acquisition of a little start-up company, kind of Stanford transitioning into Google where me and four of my grad students then became Street View enthusiasts. And we built up Street View and with a singular vision to photograph every street in the world,” Thrun said.
Three years later in 2010, Google X – the tech giant’s lab that created its Waymo self-driving car program and the augmented reality Google Glass device – was set up by Thrun, Yoky Matsuoka, and Astro Teller.
The aim of the lab was to develop “moonshots” – inventions that could be big in the future. Waymo was spun out of Google X in September and is now Google’s driverless car division. At the U.S. search giant, Google X was a big secret.
“We started Google X – with the self-driving car project. And the idea was to really kind of build an innovation center that has authority to just do crazy things,” Thrun told CNBC.
“We had a separate building that no one knew about. At least for a year and a half no one in Google had a clue we existed.”
‘Just do it’
Thrun wasn’t even convinced that the self-driving car project he began at Google would be safe in public. Page then challenged Thrun to make it work and drew up a 1,000 mile route in California that was very tricky to drive.
“Look, it can be done. People can do it. Just do it.,” Page told Thrun, according to the Google X co-founder. “And to my complete surprise, blows my mind, about 15 months a later a team of 12 engineers did it.”
Waymo’s autonomous vehicles have now driven 2.5 million miles and the company is looking to partner with established automakers.
