In March 2004, none of the 15 driverless cars in the Mojave Desert crossed the finish line for a total prize money of $1 million, with the farthest distance only 11.78km, 5% of the total course. Self-driving technology was judged unviable. Nineteen months later, a Stanford University Volkswagen Touareg named Stanley completed the 212-kilometer desert course in 6 hours and 54 minutes, and is now displayed at the Smithsonian Museum. Stanley became the beginning of Waymo, a driverless taxi operating in major U.S. cities with an enterprise value of $126 billion (about 164 trillion won). Professor Sebastian Thrun, who led the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Institute, abandoned complete control of the vehicle, allowing Stanley to learn terrain independently using probabilistic methods, an approach summarized in his co-authored textbook *Probabilistic Robotics*. Google co-founder Larry Page recognized Thrun's approach, and Thrun joined Google in 2007, creating Street View and establishing "Google X," whose self-driving team later spun off into Waymo. In 2024, Waymo partnered with Hyundai to install a sixth-generation autonomous driving system on the Ioniq 5. Thrun left Google in 2012 to found the online education platform Udacity, acquired by Accenture in 2024; his flying-car venture Kitty Hawk closed in 2022, and his AI company Crossing Minds was bought by OpenAI in 2025.