Ive seen Council Members attending from across the country and delight to have all of you in the room and watching from cspan as well. Were at a moment now, a time that doesnt happen for all generations. For the moment maybe equivalent to the horse and buggy, the automobile. Its a true revolution were about to experience. Its going to be coming sooner than any of us realized. People like chris urmson have been leading the revolution realize it. Things will be changing for the better very soon in ways we havent started to think about. We wanted to bring people together to look at not only the exciting areas around the benefits of selfdriving cars, traffic safety, at the top of it, also the implications and how we need to think about redoing the urban landscape and think about Economic Needs of the workers who will be displaced and various impacts and benefits and problems that come with this incredible revolution that will transform our society. Were so excited to have all of you here. Thank you for coming. I want to give you an overview of the day and thank those who made this event possible and invite a few people for remarks and get into our great lineup of speakers. First, i want to acknowledge the fact that this event would not be happening at all without the office of Los Angeles Mayor garcetti. For those who have flown in or joining us from outside of l. A. , you may not know what a special mayor this man is. He is someone actually endorsed by tech when he was running. Hes been tech savvy from his days before running his office. Someone who has been a bit like an obama or bill clinton, you know, in l. A. In that hes hired the best staff and hired a lot of smart people expanding l. A. s horizons in new and interesting ways. The fact were here today is a sign of that. Were bringing you these incredible people here. Without any further adieu, let me welcome to the stage, jason, from the Mayors Office of Technological Development for a welcome. Jason. [ applause ] good morning, everyone. How are you doing . I guess its afternoon now. Thank you so much for hosting this event at city hall. I think for the next round of the tech fire summit focused on innovation and transportation, you should really kick it off with your rendition of sam cook, change will come, get a gospel choir behind you an liven things up a ton. It will be a great start. On behalf of mayor eric garcetti, its my pleasure to welcome you all to the l. A. City hall. The city of los angeles has sought to be at the forefront of the transportation renaissance. In a city where 70 of communities drive to work, 90 hours of traffic spent sitting in their cars and nearly 3. 7 billion in parking costs paid, we are ready to forge a new path here in the city, one that brings together leaders in the auto industry, tech innovators, planners from the city, and policymakers, to solve the mobility challenges brought on by population growth and pockets of dependency spread across our sprawling region. Just last year, the department of transportation released its Mobility Plan entitled urban mobility in a digital age, making l. A. The first city to actively and specifically address the city around selfdriving vehicles. The future is now, ladies and gentlemen. Eric garcetti, you have a leader, along with his administration that wants to serve as a partner to you all, ready and excited to explore the capacity of Technological Advancement like Autonomous Vehicles, to solve one of the regions most pressing challenges. Thank you to techfire and david, for all the hard work youve done to bring this day together. Thank you to the honored guests here including Council Member mike bonin. Thank you for joining this conversation and rec nice to the association of governments and their support of this event as well. Were excited to be hosting. Thank you, everyone. [ applause ] thank you so much, jason and everyone with the Mayors Office. Theyve been fantastic to work with, norma and billy, thank you. I want to pick up on what jason said. Big thanks are do to the association of governments, sky. I should say many years ago i was working with an l. A. Business group that inspired me to get more focused on the transportation world and ran a project by musk because i was so scared by the statistics of the numbers put into the sky regional transportation report years ago realizing how things were already quite bad in l. A. And would get worse if we didnt all come together. Sky plays a really Critical Role not only supporting this event today but leading all of us to think big and deeply. Theyve done great reports about Autonomous Vehicles. Thank you, hassan. And id like to invite a sky board member from San Bernardino county. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you, david. It is an honor to be here with all you bright people here about the future of transportation. I get to represent not only as a transportation chair but san diego county, the largest county in the United States. A lot of space to work out there. Its important we Work Together because we need to plan for what transportation is about. We want to be your partner Going Forward and be in lockstep for the future of our Smart Transportation systems. Thank you for having me here as well. Thank you very much. I look forward to having selfdriving Car Companies work in los angeles. I want to acknowledge our Event Partners as well. Mobility one. They are stuck in traffic and have done great work, david, come up from washington, d. C. , at their events of Autonomous Vehicles and were happy to have them as event parters . I want to reflect on this moment. We had our experiences over the years and los angeles across the world. We sometimes forget what a dangerous thing it is. Driving is something we have to do. We have to put up with it. We humans are not perfect at the wheel. Weve come to accept what isnt acceptable. The number of highway deaths 1. 25 million around the world. 2. 2 globally. The New York Times had a great column this week saying maybe Driverless Cars will finally kill off the worlds most deadliest invention. Even in the u. S. Alone, 37,461 people were killed in Motor Vehicle deaths in 2016, like a 737 aircraft falling from the sky every working day. Imagine for those of you who flew out here perhaps, if we had an Airline Coming down every working day, we would say, gosh, flying is unacceptable, too dangerous, immoral, the number of deaths per day and thats whats happening on the road. When very soon it becomes possible to have Driverless Cars, selfdriving cars take away these deaths because they really will be much safer than humans as much as we like to think were the best, were actually not very good drivers after all. Maybe some day we will be at the point it becomes immoral to allow humans to be at the wheel. Something like getting a pilots license, not something everyone has to do and maybe something we look back on like cigarettes, a real Public Health risk, how did we ever allow that. It will be fascinating to see how society changes, obviously not annuals through deaths but the suffering involved from injuries and all the costs involved and accidents, you know, huge impacts. Also, of course, there will be challenges that come with selfdriving cars. We will see the labor market disrupted and seen incredible political problems, in some parts automation. We will have great impacts to truck driving, taxi driving and even ubers and lyfts of the world will not need drivers as much or maybe not as many er doctors, police and firemen and insurance adjustors, all sorts of impacts we hadnt thought of or Car Dealerships will scale back, we wont have the used car salesman or body shops. A little bit looking back, we have the Horse Carriage industry go away, all these new areas came to fill the job market. We have to be sure as a society how people will lose their jobs and economic disruption, Something Like universal basic income. We tend to not be able to have these deep long term policy discussions in this country right now. We have to find a way to do that and realize, this is coming sooner rather than later. We think things are disrupted politically because of economic suffering. We need to be careful because theres a lot more on the road ahead. A lot of things to think about. I dont mean to be too negative. I am incredibly excited about the benefits it will bring not only traffic safety. Convenience. Warner brothers just announced, in l. A. , wouldnt it be great to watch a movie instead of sitting on the 405 in frustration . Take a nap. The blind being able to drive. Our parents or grandparents that cant safely drive. All sorts of benefits as well as costs come down for deliveries, new startups that will transform society and services we cant imagine. Its incredibly exciting. I hope in l. A. We make sure we have this alternative Car Companies come down and test things in l. A. , the city more than anywhere else our car culture, its definitely time we make sure l. A. Is the forefront of this revolution. Without any further adieu, i want to introduce someone who is really i think more so than just about anyone in the world, responsible for driving this revolution, no pun intended. Chris urmson directed the google selfdriving project. Theyre already announcing hitting the streets in phoenix with the technology. This happened super fast. Some people even said because of the work that google did with chris, they had kick started earlier than other companies we may see 2 million lives saved because this is happening faster than it otherwise would. Its incredible, an incredible thing for the betterment of humanity. The Silicon Valley of l. A. Wants to change the world. Saving 2 million lives by bringing Autonomous Vehicles more quickly, thats changing the world, folks. Chris urmson these days is leading what Fortune Magazine calls the startup with the best find. The secret. And the reporter who wrote that article is in the audience and will be excited as all of us to learn some of those secrets about the innovation. This is an Amazing Company which has indeed not only chris at its helm but top minds from uber, from tesla, from others leading us to days ahead. Chris has a great history well get into in our discussion with the challenge in his days in Southern California. Were really excited to have him back here. Without any further adieu, let me ask all of you to give a very warm welcome to chris urmson. [ applause ] chris, thank you so much for being in l. A. Take us back 10 years ago, you were here for the challenge and tell us for those who dont know how it was the kickoff for the modern revolution. Thank you. And thank you for today and the Mayors Office for hosting us. For that introduction. Its not sure if i will get my head out through the door after all of that. 10 years ago, even longer now, i guess, 14 years ago the Defense Department announced the first grand challenge. The idea was to drive a car from los angeles to las vegas across the desert and do that without Remote Control and do it without a midget hiding inside, wrapped in aluminum foil or anything. The idea at the time was can we help our young men and women in harms way driving supply convoys across the deserts in unpleasant places in the world. Back then it was announced as the grand challenge, akin to lindbergh crossing the atlantic. No one believed we could actually do it in a time frame that was meaningful. We went out for the first challenge. It was about 150 miles. We went about 7 miles. The team i was the technical director for, we got stuck up on a berm and basically went into flames, that was it, after we drove through three fence posts. It was an all around awesome day. We did drive at 40 miles an hour across the desert. We did do that with nobody on board. While the media said this is a disaster and those part of it kind of felt the same way that day, the Defense Department had the wisdom to say this is a pretty big step forward. Come back a year from now and see how you do then. Back in 2005, they had the second challenge. This year, five teams met that challenge and we got on our soapboxes and said, this is coming and we can go do something meaningful with it one day. In the media, didnt you have various challenges your car would flip over the night before . I see, you give to the ego and you take away. Absolutely. This was one of the tougher parts about it, these were out in the desert on some of the rough roads. This was very experimental. The first year we were out there trying to get the vehicle to drive 150 miles for the first time. We had it on this oval track. We did some very simple math. We said if we drive it 30 miles an hour, to drive 150 miles it will take 5 hours. We drive it 50 miles an hour, 150 miles will take 3 hours. We picked 50 miles an hour. That seemed better. About two laps into this thing, it hit a soft patch of dirt, tripped over itself and rolled over and crushed i dont know 50,000, 100,000 worth of equipment on it. We were graduate students and we had a bunch of people there and we got the thing turned right way up and entered it into the competition. Probably parts of the reason why i drove through three fence posts before bursting into flames. We did this again a year later. We got smarter in many ways. This time the vehicle actually finished a 150 miles an hour loop around the course and couldnt chase wit normal suvs anymore and had to chase it with humvees because the ground was too rough. It finished the 150 miles and the team out testing it said its been going well, why dont we have it drive itself so we can more easily take it back to base. Part of the way through that it got wide in the turn and hit a ramp and basically did a dukes of hazzard barrel ramp on the roof. We havent parked anything on the roof in more than a decade, my team, so things are looking good. You guys won a Million Dollar prize as part of that, right . Yeah. That second challenge actually a team from stanford won. I was at Carnegie Mellon out of pittsburgh, pennsylvania. We went home with a nice job, guys. They got a giant Million Dollars novelty check. A year and a half later the Defense Department had a third competition, this one out at victorville, at the old air base there. This time the vehicles actually had to drive on their side of the road not just on the road. They had to stop for stop signs. They paid a bunch of stunt drivers to drive cars around to create traffic the vehicles had to interact with. This was really exciting for us. Our team did win this. We won 2 million actually and we came first that year. We got to witness the first robotic car crash so cornell and mit crashed into each other about 3 miles an hour. I guess it was an historic day all around for selfdriving cars. That environment, as an econom academic environment back then, did you have any sense you would be already at this point were seeing these things not just in the realm of academics but transform the Automotive Industry, did you think it would happen this fast . Its tricky because back then we didnt really understand the implications what this could mean for improving lives, safety on the road and everyday, the visceral benefit it will have to folks who dont have to sit in traffic or better yet, can get from a to b when they never used to be able to. Its funny because this happened very quickly on any reasonable scale. When you start at this you dont really understand how hard it is. Our aspiration was to do it even more quickly than this. Looking back that was very naive. Turns out this is a very hard problem and incredible to see how the world has changed over the last even 5 years. To go from that world of academia to the commercial world, tell us, for those who dont know, the audience, how youve been approached by google and how this got started and how long you were doing things behind the scenes before the public announcement. I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Google this was back when google was just a Search Engine and didnt have android and i dont know all the other Amazing Things the company does. I was approach and said, hey, would you like to come to google and do selfdriving cars. My reaction was, why . Youre a Search Engine, why would you ever want to do anything in this space. Through spending some time with them understood theyre really an Engineering Company and want to solve important problems and this really comes from larry and sergey at the top. I joined the company in 2009. We didnt talk at all publicly about what we were doing until late 2010, almost 2011. Over the last over that 7 1 2 years period i was there from 2009 to 2016, i guess thats what the math says, we were able to push the technology. I think we helped change the perception somewhat that this technology, when it could happen and what it could mean to people. Now, im on to a new adventure with an Exciting Company thats helping the automotive world come to terms and advance their ability in this space. Im glad you mentioned it. Tell us about