humans make bad drivers. They talked on the phone and turned on the red light, signaled left and turned right. They drink too much beer and crash into trees or turn into traffic as they hit their kids. They have blind spots, leg cramps, seizures, and heart attacks. They are rubbernecks, hot dogs, and pity on the tortoise, causing fender benders, pileups, and direct collisions. They nodded in front of the wheel, grappled with maps, played with buttons, exchanged pleasantries of marriage, took too slow turns, took bends too fast, spilled coffee on lap, and flipped their cars. Of the ten million accidents that Americans face each year, nine and a half million are their own mistakes.
Case in point: The driver is on the track to my right. He spun half of it in his seat, taking the Lexus I was traveling with an engineer named Anthony Levandowski. The two cars headed south on Highway 880 in Oakland, walking more than seventy miles an hour, but the man needed time. He held his phone to the window with both hands until his car was framed for granted. Then he snapped the picture, examined it on the screen, and tapped a long text message with his thumb. By the time he put his hand back on the wheel and glanced down the street, half a minute had passed.
Levandowski shook his head. He's used to this sort of thing. The Lexus is what you call a special model. This is overcome by laser towers spinning and being touched with cameras, radar, antennas, and G.P.S. It looks like an ice cream truck, a light weapon for work in town. Levandowski used to tell people that the car was designed to chase a tornado or to track down a mosquito, or that he belonged to an elite team of ghost hunters. But now the vehicle is clearly marked: "Own Car Drives."
Every week for the past year and a half, Levandowski has taken the Lexus on a slightly more tangible journey. He left his home in Berkeley around eight o'clock, waved to his fiancée and their son, and went to his office in Mountain View, forty-three miles away. The journey took him through streets and highways, old salt plains, and pine-green foothills, across the glittering Blue of San Francisco, and down to the heart of Silicon Valley. In rush hour traffic, it could take two hours, but Levandowski does not mind. He took it as a study. While other drivers gawk at him, he observes them: recording their maneuvers in his car's sensor logs, analyzing the flow of traffic, and marking any issues for future review. The only exhausting part is when there is roadwork or crash up front and Lexus insists on taking over the wheel. A clanging sound, fun but urgent, then a warning appeared on his dashboard screen: "Within a mile, get ready to continue manual control."
Levandowski is an engineer at Google X, the company's semi-secret laboratory for experimental technology. He changed thirty-three last March, but still has a good skinny and nerd body from the kids at my school science club. She wears sunglasses and big fluorescent sneakers, has a long stride and loping - she's six foot seven - and given for a nice talk about fantastic themes. Cybernetic dolphins! Harvest farm itself! Like many of his colleagues in Mountain View, Levandowski is an equally idealist and voracious capitalist part. He wants to improve the world and make a fortune doing it. He came up with this impulse honestly: his mother was a French diplomat, his father an American businessman. Although Levandowski spent most of his childhood in Brussels, his English had no accent other than the absence of a certain inflection - the bright and electrical chatter of an overzealous processor. "My fiance is a dancer in his soul," he told me. "I'm a robot."
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