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The man responsible for bringing the Google autonomous driving industry to life was Chris Urmson, the company’s former chief technology officer. Urmson recently announced his retirement out of the blue, saying only that he needed a new challenge. However, sources indicate that the CTO’s decision to leave could have more to do with his disagreement regarding the direction that Google was taking its self-driving division. He also apparently did not get along with the recently appointed CEO of the autonomous car division, John Krafcik.
As EE Times notes, Urmson is undoubtedly the father of the self-driving industry at Google. For over seven years, he and his team worked on and refined the technology that has allowed vehicles equipped the sensors that Urmson helped develop to travel the equivalent of 1.8 million miles. This made him the most visible face of the company’s effort at creating self-driving cars.
Posting on Medium, Urmson detailed how he got involved with the project and the reasons he cited for his decision to leave.
“After leading our cars through the human equivalent of 150 years of driving and helping our project make the leap from pure research to developing a product that we hope someday anyone will be able to use, I am ready for a fresh challenge,” he wrote.
Urmson joins Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson as central figures who recently decided to leave the project. Zhu and Ferguson are major software designers that made major contributions to making Google’s self-driving car a reality.
According to the New York Times, much of the friction within the project started after Google decided to make John Krafcik, the former head of Hyundai America the division’s CEO. Urmson did not like the direction that Krafcik was taking the project, which likely contributed to the former’s decision to simply leave.
