CTO of Google's self-driving car project, Chris Urmson leaves
Chris Urmson has been working on the self-driving car project for Google for seven and a half years, and today he announced he was leaving the team in a blog post. After Google X founder, Sebastian Thrun left in 2013, he took over as the director and led the team until former Hyundai executive John Kafcik was hired as the CEO of its car department. According to the New York Times, Urmson was unhappy with the direction of the project under Krafcik, and Krafcik also had a fall out with Larry Page. However, the post just says he's "ready for a fresh challenge."
The technology of autonomous driving has come really far since we first saw Google's self-driving car. A partnership with Chrysler also shows that it has entered into a more down-to-earth phase in development. Chris Urmson worked on self-driving technology at Carnegie Mellon to win DARPA challenges, and then joined Google. He watched the self-driving car go from a goal of driving 100,000 miles by itself to actually doing 1.8 million miles, with only a few accidents that were usually caused by humans. There's no suggestion as to what he's going to do next, but he wrote, "If I can find another project that turns into an obsession and becomes something more, I will consider myself twice lucky."
Via: | Engadget | - Source: | Chris Urmson (Medium) |
