ARLINGTON: Kaushik Raghu, Senior Staff Engineer at Audi, takes his hands off the steering wheel while demonstrating an Audi self driving vehicle on I-395 expressway in Arlington, Va., July 15, 2016. Experts say the development of self-driving cars over the coming decade depends on an unreliable assumption by most automakers. — AP

LOS ANGELES: Chris Urmson, who was instrumental in building Google’s self-driving car project, said on Friday he is leaving the team after seven and a half years. Alphabet Inc’s Google had named Urmson chief technical officer of the project after it hired former Hyundai executive John Krafcik to be chief executive of the project.

Urmson, who joined the project when it was launched and has been a public face of Google’s autonomous vehicle efforts, testified before a US Senate panel on autonomous cars in March. Krafcik confirmed Urmson’s departure in a tweet on Friday afternoon. Urmson, in a blog post late Friday, said he was “ready for a fresh challenge.” He said he was not sure what he would do next. “Going to take some time and get some perspective from outside of Google,” he wrote in a text message to Reuters.

Urmson told Reuters earlier this year that self-driving cars are coming. “I’ve gone from hoping this would happen to thinking it might happen to knowing it will happen,” Urmson said. Google self-driving car project spokesman Johnny Luu confirmed Urmson’s departure and praised him. “Seven years ago, the idea that a car could drive itself wasn’t much more than an idea. Chris has been a vital force for the project, helping the team move from a research phase to a point where this life-saving technology will soon become a reality,” Luu said.

Google’s project has had other significant departures, even as it has hired dozens of new employees. Earlier this year, Anthony Levandowski, who was product manager for Google’s self-driving car program, left the project to co-found a startup with two other former Google employees. — Reuters