Startups Are Laser-Focused on Helping Self-Driving Cars See

Austin Russell hops in a motorized cart and goes whizzing through a cavernous building on the edge of San Francisco Bay that is normally used to disembark cruise-ship passengers. As the lanky 22-year-old CEO tools around, he passes a mannequin, a tire and a co-worker on a bicycle--all elements of a demonstration to show how well his company's sensor can monitor the environment. On a nearby screen, those shapes appear in rainbow colors that signify exactly how far away they are. All of it is the result of laser beams shooting out of a black box and bouncing off more than a million points around the room every second. "It's easy to make an autonomous vehicle that works 99% of the time," Russell says later.