VANCOUVER — There's a new urgency to bring Google's self-driving cars to consumers, and for one of the program's top executives, it's getting personal.
The head of the company's driverless car program, Chris Urmson, told attendees at the TED conference here that his 11-year-old son could get his driver's permit within the next four and a half years.
"My team and I are committed to making sure that doesn’t happen," he said.
Google is aiming to get its driverless cars on the streets by 2020. Whether it's able to do so is unclear. It's been working on plans for an autonomous vehicle for years, but questions remain about whether government regulators will allow the vehicles or if consumers will pay for them.
The driverless car space is also becoming increasingly competitive. Major automakers like Mercedes, Audi and BMW are rushing to develop models. Apple isrumored to be working on a car of its own.
Urmson's talk, part of a larger discussion at TED about advances in machine learning, didn't address competitors, but instead focused on how Google's cars operate.
Visuals of test drives wooed the crowd. The cars can maneuver around traffic cones, pedestrians, and even obstacles that would otherwise be hidden from the driver, like an out-of-view cyclist about to run a red light.
In one particularly colorful example, Urmson showed data from a self-driving car in Mountain View, Calif. as it tried to figure out what to do as a woman in a motorized wheelchair chased a duck in circles in the center of the road. (The car stopped and waited for the woman to move.)
"There's nowhere in the (Department of Motor Vehicle's) handbook that tells you how to deal with that," Umson said to laughs.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave his own endorsement of self-driving cars at a separate event Tuesday in California. He called the technology a "solved problem" and predicted that such cars would become commonplace in the next 20 years.
"In the distant future people may outlaw driver cars," Musk said, according to a Wall Street Journal report of the event. "You can’t have a person operating a two-ton death machine!”
Musk then said Tesla would become a leader in sales of autonomous cars.
Other automakers, like Ford, are focusing on technology that can assist human drivers by, say, tapping the brakes in traffic or helping with parallel parking. But Google's Urmson made the case that automakers must go one step further in creating cars that require no involvement from a driver.
His reasoning: About 1.2 million people are killed on the world's roads each year, with 33,000 car-related deaths in the United States alone. (That's the equivalent of a Boeing 737 falling out of the sky "every working day," Urmson said.)
"We think the right path is self-driving because the urgency is so large," he said.
More coverage of TED on LinkedIn: