Photographs by
WINNI
WINTERMEYER
“Let’s see if I can get us killed,”
Sebastian Thrun advises me in a Germanic baritone
as we shoot south onto the 101 in his silver Nissan
Leaf. Thrun, a pioneer of the self-driving car, cuts
across two lanes of traffic, then jerks into a third,
threading the car into a sliver of space between an
eighteen-wheeler and a sedan. ¶ Thrun seems determined to halve the normally eleven minute commute
from the Palo Alto headquarters of Udacity, the
online university he oversees, to Google X, the secretive
Google research lab he co-founded and leads.