News that Chris Urmson, the long-time face of Google’s self-driving car program, was leaving set off speculation last week about tensions and turmoil within the high-profile “moonshot” project as his departure followed a number of others. Undoubtedly, there were disagreements.
It may also be the latest sign that the well-funded R&D effort, nested within Alphabet Inc.’s X initiative, is close to translating what it’s learned from 1.8 million miles of autonomous vehicle road tests into a revenue-generating business.
Urmson, chief technology officer for Google X’s self-driving car research team, spent more than seven years working with company engineers, software developers and roboticists to refine technology that one day will “take you from A to B at the push of a button,” as he said in a valedictory post on the blog site Medium.
Initial reaction to Urmson’s decision noted he was the latest and most prominent departure from what is by all accounts the best-funded and highest-profile autonomous vehicle skunkworks in the industry. Other Google engineers who worked directly and indirectly with the self-driving car project to leave since last year include Lior Ron and Anthony Levandowski, who in January formed Otto, a company developing self-driving technology for commercial trucks. The New York Times reported that two other key engineers, Dave Ferguson and Jiajun Zhu, left Google this year to start their own tech company, citing people with knowledge of the resignations.
That report also tied Urmson’s move to the arrival of veteran auto executive John Krafcik as chief executive officer for the Google car program in September 2015. The arrival of Krafcik, who has extensive automotive industry experience, was widely seen as a sign that Google was moving toward commercializing its technology.
“Mr. Urmson has been unhappy with the direction of the car project under Mr. Krafcik’s leadership and quarreled privately several months ago with Larry Page over where it was headed, according to two former Google employees,” the Times wrote.
Could be. Departures of this type are also entirely predictable to Helena Yli-Renko, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business who studies entrepreneurship and the evolution of tech-based firms.
“Frankly, it’s very typical of technology ventures when they move from the R&D phase to commercial phase and an indication that things are moving along,” she said. “Google has this combination of resources and expertise from a variety of technical fields. It’s pretty clear they are reaching an inflection point where the technological research is getting to a stage where it’s actually commercially viable.”
Google hasn’t shared a plan or timetable for commercializing its research and Johnny Luu, a spokesman for the vehicle program, declined to discuss when that might happen. Neither he nor other Google officials will confirm how many people are in the self-driving car group – and how many have left.
Urmson “was absolutely fundamental in building out Google’s program, putting it in the public eye,” said Jeremy Carlson, an automotive technology analyst with researcher IHS Markit. “It’s hard to figure out exactly how they’ll commercialize the program, but they’re moving in that direction.”
Since Krafcik showed up, Google’s self-driving car project announced a deal to source Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans from automaker FCA Corp. for the next phase of road-tests and is hiring engineers for development work at a new facility in Novi, Michigan, that gives the Silicon Valley giant an outpost in the heart of the U.S. auto industry.
Urmson was a celebrated robotics scientist and professor at Carnegie Mellon University when he joined the Mountain View, California-based company.
Krafcik came to Google with decades of automotive experience. Starting in the 1980s as a production engineer with NUMMI, the former GM-Toyota joint-venture auto factory in Fremont, California, that’s now Tesla Motor’s auto-assembly hub. In the 90s he was an engineer developing light trucks for Ford. In the 2000s, Krafcik first led product development for Hyundai Motor’s U.S. unit and then spent five years as the unit’s chief executive officer. And just prior to joining Google, Krafcik spent 18 months as president of TrueCar Inc., a web-based service that provides detailed vehicle pricing information to consumers and connects them with new and used car dealers in its network.
“Google is exactly at the stage where you bring in a new commercial head to take the research that’s been done and make it a business,” Yli-Renko said.
Another factor may well be contributing to the wave of departures. When Urmson joined Google in 2009, the company’s self-driving car program was essentially the only game in town. Seven years later every major automaker and Elon Musk’s Tesla, startup carmakers such as Faraday Future, tech firms including NVidia, MobilEye and Intel, suppliers Delphi, Bosch, Continental, Denso and Autoliv, and ride-sharing firms Uber and Lyft, through a partnership with GM, are vying for a foothold in this next-generation auto market.
Urmson didn’t say in his post what he’ll do next but presumably “could go anywhere he wants,” said IHS Markit’s Carlson.
There may be a hitch, however.
“I’d be surprised if he didn’t have a non-compete clause and a combination of stock or financial compensation package that keep him from going to Tesla or Uber or somewhere else,” said USC’s Yli-Renko.
