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    Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car-And How It Will Reshape Our World
    Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car-And How It Will Reshape Our World
    Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car-And How It Will Reshape Our World
    Audiobook11 hours

    Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car-And How It Will Reshape Our World

    Written by Lawrence D. Burns and Christopher Shulgan

    Narrated by George Newbern

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    About this audiobook

    A deep dive into the race to develop and perfect the driverless car—an innovation that promises to be the most disruptive change to our way of life since the smartphone—by a veteran insider of the automotive and tech worlds

    In Autonomy, former GM executive and current advisor to the Google Self-Driving Car project Lawrence Burns offers a sweeping history of the race to make the driverless car a reality. In the past decade, Silicon Valley companies like Google, Tesla and Uber have positioned themselves to revolutionize the way we move around by developing driverless vehicles while traditional auto companies like General Motors, Ford, and Daimler have been fighting back by partnering by with new tech start-ups. It’s not a question of whether the self-driving car will disrupt the automobile industry; it’s a question of when, how, and who will win the race.

    With the first driverless car likely to hit markets in less than five years, Burns also looks toward the future and explains how this new technology will impact our lives—from removing the hassles of driving, parking, and refueling our cars, to eliminating 90 percent of road fatalities, drastically reducing our carbon footprint, and automating yet another segment of blue collar industries, putting more workers out of their jobs.

    We are on the brink of a technological revolution that promises to fundamentally change how we interact with our world. A chronicle of the past, diagnosis of the present, and prediction of the future, Autonomy is the ultimate guide to understanding the driverless car and to navigating the revolution it sparks.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 28, 2018
    ISBN9780062847973
    Author

    Lawrence D. Burns

    Lawrence D. Burns served as corporate vice president of research, development and planning at General Motors, where he oversaw GM’s advanced technology and innovation programs as well as corporate strategy. He was also a professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan and led the Program for Sustainable Mobility at Columbia University. He has served as an adviser to the Google self-driving car project (now Waymo) since 2011 and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He lives in Franklin, Michigan.

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    • 4/5
      A look at the development of self-driving cars and the possibilities for disruptive but ultimately beneficial changes that society will likely experience as we switch over from human-driven, gas-guzzling, privately owned vehicles to autonomous electric ones that people hire only when they need them.It's an interesting topic, and I agree with author Lawrence Burns that it's one that's likely to have a huge effect on all our futures. (One that can't come soon enough, if you ask me, because I really hate driving.) But my interest levels in the book itself were a bit variable. It doesn't start off very promisingly, I'm afraid, with a long section covering the DARPA races of the mid-2000s that I found surprisingly unsatisfying, as it glossed over a lot of the technical details I was interested in without being terribly successful at turning it into an exciting human-interest story instead.Fortunately, much of the rest of it worked better for me, although it never did get as much into the technical side of things as I was hoping. For me, the software engineering is one of the most interesting aspects of this subject. But, although I did find the chapter devoted to the testing of Google's automated vehicles one the most engaging parts of the book, it really only scratched the surface of the technical challenges involved.That may not be too surprising, though, as Burns is a businessman, not a technical guy, although his career, unusually, has encompassed both Detroit and Silicon Valley and has perhaps even involved a sort of synthesis of the two. So he includes a lot of detail about the business side of things and the personalities involved and how different companies have taken different approaches. Sometimes a little more than I quite wanted, to be honest, and his position probably isn't entirely unbiased. But he's very, very knowledgeable about all of this, and he has a very clear vision of the future that I think is both realistic and worthwhile.So, even if this isn't entirely the book I was hoping it would be, I'd say it is definitely worth reading if this is a subject you're interested in.