While we know which teams ultimately succeeded, Burns and Shulgan fill in much of the back story of what happened over the next four years as this robotic driving technology evolved. If there is one downside to the tale, it’s the focus on the teams from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford with very little told of the other programs.

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to tell with these two teams. Many of the engineers and researchers that staffed those programs later went on to become the core of the Google Self-Driving Car project, known internally as Chauffeur before it eventually morphed into Waymo. That team included Sebastian Thrun, Mike Montemerlo, Chris Urmson, Bryan Salesky and of course the now infamous Anthony Levandowski among countless others.
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