The guy built a self-driving motorcycle. I laughed at the first DARPA Grand Challenge when it travelled 30cm before falling over. I ate my words the next year when it made it most of the way.

By comparison, after a year of learning to ride a motorbike I barely make it to work each day without shitting myself.

Why does he get all of the credit for this? He was part of a team.

Sure, but he was the team leader. I was part of a team that built autonomous vehicles too, but the fact that there were others involved doesn't stop me writing "built an autonomous vehicle" on my CV.

There was no team without him, period.

Why do you say that?

on the other hand there was no stolen intellectual property without him either.

I for sure would have remembered some rinky dink motorcycle lining up for the start in Primm in 2005. His team didn't make it past the NQE in LA, IIRC.

The physical object is in the Smithsonian [1]. There's footage of it falling over in 2005 [2][3]. Is that enough? :-P

1) http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah... 2) http://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/the-blue-tea... 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bkhviWgSg

Alas, no.

The 2005 Grand Challenge was divided into two parts: the national qualification event, where you went around an obstacle course on a closed raceway in an effort to qualify for a limited number of race slots, and the real race, which was a brutal 150 mile course through some pretty gnarly desert terrain.

Blue Team never made it past the NQE, which is why everyone's obsession with the motorbike makes no sense to those of us who actually made it to the real deal.

The Smithsonian's decision to memorialize Levandowski's engineering mediocrity is, to say the least, puzzling.

Ah, understood. Thanks for clarifying that, and apologies for misrepresenting the achievement!

You missed his creative brilliance, he couldn't compete head on with other teams, but he had a more economical vehicle while upping the stakes.

Video of the guy and his bike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CYGT97i8qU

If that blows your mind then you should watch this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XFXj81mvInc

...and keep in mind that this was done around 1990.

Oh, I'm not. But I don't think the other Maps engineers took home $100 Million.

Google clearly thought it was in their best interest, but I stand by what I said: As an engineer, the most well beaten path to wealth is building something that sells. To get paid and not even have to do that is itself something of an accomplishment, though not one I'd be very proud of.

According to The Verge article on Levandowski, that is why he left GoogleX/Waymo: they wouldn't ship. And he was too outspoken to be in charge of Google X self-driving.

Just curious, do you have an inside scoop on what value he's brought to Google and other companies?

In these types of situations where a lot of money is involved, I've noticed folks are pretty quick to vilify someone with little information aside from the heavily biased info that leaks into the news.

While $120MM in a vacuum does sound ridiculous, it's hard to know (or even put a price on) his true value without understanding his contributions in depth.

This criticism doesn't extend to you, but in general I've seen a lot of the same folks make snap judgements about someone's ability based on what they've read from news and then vehemently decry how job interviews (which yield far more information) aren't effective at judging someone's worth.

I think I've not made myself clear. I don't vilify $100mm pay days. Honestly engineering doesn't usually take home what I think it deserves. But to get $120 mill and be building competing startups the entire time seems pretty sleazy. I don't know where I'd draw the line of "you are being fully compensated for your time" but I'd say $10+ mill a year clears it.

Also, if they valued his equity grants at $120mm and he held much, he likely netted far more.

Not many words would be written about his pay day if he made a clean break from google before building a competing product.

The problem is that if this is proven against him then this is all people will remember of him. It is a real fall from his accomplishments.

> but I wouldn't belittle his engineering accomplishments.

It's not belittling engineering efforts if one states that rewarding a non-production research project with 120 million would be adequate in a lot of cases.