Are Human Drivers Finally Obsolete?

Mar 20, 2026

Listen in Apple Podcasts Pocket Casts Castro

This episode isn’t summarized yet

Create a free account and summarize it. In a few minutes you’ll have the key takeaways and a section-by-section summary.

Create a free account Sign in

How a secret project at Google led to driverless cars on American roads.

Freakonomics Radio shares a story from our friends at Search Engine. (Part one of a two-part series.)

SOURCES:
- Alex Davies, author of Driven: The Race To Create the Autonomous Car.
- Chris Urmson, co-founder and C.E.O. of Aurora.
- Don Burnette, founder and C.E.O. of Kodiak AI.
- PJ Vogt, reporter, writer, and host of the Search Engine podcast.
- Sebastian Thrun, roboticist, C.E.O. of Sage AI Labs, adjunct faculty at Stanford University.
- Timothy B. Lee, author of Understanding AI newsletter.

RESOURCES:
- "Very few of Waymo’s most serious crashes were Waymo’s fault," by Kai Williams (Understand AI, 2025).
- Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car, by Alex Davies (2021).
- "An Oral History of the Darpa Grand Challenge, the Grueling Robot Race That Launched the Self-Driving Car," by Alex Davies (WIRED, 2017).
- Understanding AI, newsletter on Substack.
- Waymo Safety Dashboard.

EXTRAS:
- "The Fascinatingly Mundane Secrets of the World’s Most Exclusive Nightclub," by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
- Search Engine, podcast by PJ Vogt.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.