August 20, 2018 12:55PM # Driverless Cars: You Heard It Here First By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE Lawrence D. Burns asks, [in the Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/articles/late-to-the-driverless-revolution-1534520404) and in his new book *Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car*, why the major automobile companies ignored the technology that could create self-driving cars and are now playing catchup to Google: > Early in 2011, two top engineers for Google traveled together to Detroit on what amounted to a diplomatic mission. They had just spent 18 months on a top-secret project called Chauffeur: the development of a car that could drive itself over 10 different 100-mile routes on public roads. Now they were looking for a partner to carry the project forward. “The idea was, if you’re going to make self-driving cars, you have to work with a car company,” recalls Chris Urmson, who made the trip with fellow engineer Anthony Levandowski. “Maybe they’ll sell us cars to build a fleet. Maybe we’re going to be retrofitting our stuff onto their cars to sell.” > > > But they couldn’t find any takers. They might have been better prepared if they had read Cato analyst [Randal O’Toole](https://www.cato.org/people/randal-otoole)’s early warning, also [in the Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703580904575131511589391150) but in early 2010: > Consumers today can buy cars that steer themselves; accelerate and brake to maintain a safe driving distance from cars ahead; and detect and avoid collisions with other cars on all sides. Making them completely driverless will involve little more than a software upgrade. O’Toole’s article was based on his book *[Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It](https://store.cato.org/book/gridlock).* Reading his manuscript was the first time I’d heard about the possibility of self-driving cars. You’d think Detroit would have been ahead of me, but maybe not so much. ##### Related Tags [Energy and Environment](https://www.cato.org/research/energy-environment) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).