Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car

Davies, a technology journalist who covered the field for Wired, wrote the history of autonomous vehicle development centred on the people who did it.

The narrative begins with the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004, in which no vehicle completed the course, the 2005 rerun in which five did, and the 2007 Urban Challenge which required vehicles to obey traffic rules and interact with each other. Davies argues these events created the field by assembling the researchers, demonstrating feasibility and establishing the personal networks that determined who worked with whom afterward.

The subsequent narrative follows those people: Sebastian Thrun founding Google's programme, Chris Urmson leading it and later founding Aurora, Anthony Levandowski's role and his departure to found Otto which Uber acquired, the trade secrets litigation between Waymo and Uber that followed, the founding of Cruise and its acquisition by General Motors, Zoox, Argo, and the movement of a relatively small number of researchers between all of them.

Davies covers the technical approaches, including the reliance on lidar and on detailed prior mapping against the camera-based approach Tesla pursued, and the disagreement about whether incremental driver assistance leads to autonomy or is a different problem.

He also covers the failures: the Uber fatality in Tempe in 2018, the Tesla Autopilot fatalities, and the retrenchment as the timelines slipped.

The book is reported journalism about people and does not analyse the technology deeply or the economics at all. It was published in 2021 and the field has continued to consolidate since, with several well-funded programmes closing and deployment limited to defined mapped areas. Burns's Autonomy, also in this reference, covers overlapping ground from a participant's perspective.