Self-driving industry takes to the highway after robotaxi failure

When Sebastian Thrun was starting Google's self-driving car project in 2009, commercialising the technology was not on anyone's mind. "We focused on the technology more than anything else, not the go-to-market plan," he says. "That might sound bizarre, but we all knew that if we could solve this problem, then you could do what you want." Back then, it made sense that autonomous driving was just a research project. Eleven years on, however, the industry still has little idea what to do with the technology, despite some big advances over the past decade.