The Driverless Car

Sebastian Thrun helped build Google's amazing driverless car, powered by a very personal quest to save lives and reduce traffic accidents. Jawdropping video shows the DARPA Challenge-winning car motoring through busy city traffic with no one behind the wheel, and dramatic test drive footage from TED2011 demonstrates how fast the thing can really go.

Watch:

The Driverless Car




True or false? 

1. As a boy, Sebastian was afraid of cars.  

2. Sebastian has not achieved his dream yet. 

3. Sebastian’s team was the first to attempt to make a car that could navigate a desert. 

4. Sebastian's cars navigate without sensors. 

5. There doesn't need to be a human being “in the loop”. 

6. Sebastian's friend Harold is coming back soon 

7. Driving accidents are main cause of death for young people. 

8. Most accidents are caused by people making mistakes.  

9. Driverless cars could cause worse traffic jams. 

10. Driverless cars could help us regain a lot of time. 

11. Sebastian is looking forward to a future without cars at all.  

Tapescript cloze

As a boy, I loved cars. When I turned 18, I lost my best friend ___ a car accident. Like this. And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year. Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.  

I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges _____ the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert. And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars went nowhere. So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car. We built the hardware and the software. We made it learn from us, and we ____ it free in the desert. And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ____ return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars. ____ I still hadn't saved a single life.  

Since, our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive ________ by themselves -- any street in California. We've driven 140,000 miles. Our cars have sensors by _____ they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every ______ of driving. It's the perfect driving mechanism. We've driven in cities, like in San Francisco here. We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.  

We've encountered joggers, busy highways, toll booths, and this is ________ a person in the loop; the car just drives itself. In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people didn't _____ notice. Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even ___ little stunts.  

Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I ____ do something for all the people who died. Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people? And do you realize that almost all of those are ____ to human error and not machine error, and can _________ be prevented by machines?  

Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn't rely on human precision on staying in the lane - improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes, and do _____ with all traffic jams on highways? Do you realize that you, TED users, spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic, wasting your time on your daily commute? You could ______ this time. This is four billion hours wasted in this country ______. And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted.  

Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations _____ us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.  

Discuss

This Ted Talk is twelve years old - why do you think self-driving cars are still not so common?

Grammar:

Read this carefully. 

What mistakes in verb tenses can you find?

As a boy, I loved cars. When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident. Like this. And then I decided I dedicated my life to saving one million people every year. Now I didn't succeed, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.  

I have seen the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert. And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars have gone nowhere. So we have decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car. We have been building the hardware and the software. We have made it learn from us, and we have set it free in the desert. And the unimaginable has happened: it has become the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars. Yet I still haven't saved a single life.  

Since, our work focused on building driving cars that could drive anywhere by themselves -- any street in California. We drove 140,000 miles. Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving. It's the perfect driving mechanism. We drove in cities, like in San Francisco here. We drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 1.  

We encountered joggers, busy highways, toll booths, and this is without a person in the loop; the car just drives itself. In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people haven't even noticed. Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even do little stunts.  

Can you explain why the verb tenses are not appropriate or wrong?