The PayPal Mafia of Self-Driving Cars Has Been at It a Decade

Bloomberg 2017: "A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups. A decade later, the competitors are struggling to perfect the technology. The brief history of the self-driving car is parked in Pittsburgh. Robotic vehicles built by students and professors stand sentry on the campus green at Carnegie Mellon University. These cars carry scars and dents—one shows rollover damage—from participation in a legendary series of competitions organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), a research and development wing of the U.S. military. Many of the engineers involved in those contests went on to launch autonomous vehicle startups that are now steering the future of transportation.

Bloomberg 2017: "A Pentagon-funded contest spawned many of today’s self-driving startups. A decade later, the competitors are struggling to perfect the technology. The brief history of the self-driving car is parked in Pittsburgh. Robotic vehicles built by students and professors stand sentry on the campus green at Carnegie Mellon University. These cars carry scars and dents—one shows rollover damage—from participation in a legendary series of competitions organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), a research and development wing of the U.S. military. Many of the engineers involved in those contests went on to launch autonomous vehicle startups that are now steering the future of transportation.