Google Filmed Its Engineers Falling Asleep. Then It Spent 17 Years.

Business Onion · 2:49

In 2013, Google lent self-driving cars to about 140 of its own employees and told them to stay alert. Then it filmed them. At 56 mph they scrolled their phones, put on makeup, and fell asleep. That footage killed the only path with a near-term product on it. Google abandoned the human handoff entirely and committed to cars that need nobody at all — a decision that bought seventeen years with no revenue, a $75,000-a-unit laser scanner it had to redesign in-house, and, in October 2015, the first fully driverless ride anyone had taken on a public road: a legally blind man named Steve Mahan, alone, across Austin. Part 1 of 3. Follow for the rest of the series. Numbers & sources: Waymo's 500,000 paid rides/week and Alphabet's Other Bets results ($411M revenue, $2.1B operating loss) are from Alphabet's Q1 2026 earnings release. Tesla's ~380,000 cumulative driverless miles are from Tesla's July 2026 earnings call. Baidu's ~350,000 weekly rides are from Baidu's Q1 2026 results. Waymo's sensor counts are from Waymo's own 6th-generation Driver announcement. Per-vehicle costs are third-party estimates and are not used in the narration.