I’m out in Phoenix for Google’s Zeitgeist 2013. It’s kind of like google’s internal TED conference. I spoke here 2 years ago so it’s always nice to be back as a participant rather than a speaker. At the time, Larry and Sergey were really talking up the car and I ate it up. I’d love to see a world that significantly reduces the nearly 40,000 people who are killed every year in America from car crashes.

And today I got to ride in that glorious machine. There were two googlers in the front. One acting as the real life human if need be. And the other with his laptop open showing us everything the car sees. And that blew me away. It sees everything around it up to about 200 meters. It was a bit like riding in a car with a 16 year old newly licensed driver. It follows the book perfectly. Never strays out of its lane. Always comes to a complete stop. Turns are kind of harsh because it wants to turn like a robot, not give you a super smooth ride like experienced drivers do.

But all in all, I felt like I just experienced something revolutionary. We’ll soon look back and wonder why it took so long to make our roads safe. 40,000 lives is tragic. I want to see it down to zero.

Go get ‘em Google.