I finally arrived here in the San Francisco Bay Area, also known as the Silicon Valley, just a few miles south from the City, as the locals call San Francisco. The weather in the South Bay is 99% warm and sunny but always with a chilly wind around, which makes you sometimes freezing when the sun sets in the evenings and nights and you’re still hanging somewhere around with not more than just a short pant, a shirt and a volleyball. But still better than 20 miles north, where it is in San Francisco usually 10°C colder and more cloudy.

Currently I’m living with a friend from Austria, as long as I don’t have my own apartment. But hopefully I’m gonna find one soon, including some nice flatmates. When we’re already talking about people: the folks in this fast growing high-tech area are very young and multicultural. Besides the Americans there are a lots of Eurpeans (especially Germans), Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Indians, Canadians and Latin-Americans. Although or even for this reason they are very friendly, open-minded, polite and helpful. But also relaxed and casual. So it wasn’t that unusual to talk with my banker about the music we listen to and the clubs we like.

On Wednesday I started to “work” at the VW ERL (Electronics Research Laboratory) in Palo Alto, which is a small but energetic division of the Volkswagen Group, where about 45 people develop the newest stuff in electronics for all the VW brands. This includes Volkswagen, Skoda, Bentley, and Bugatti as well as Audi, Seat, and Lamborghini. I’m currently working on a project with the Stanford University’s AI Lab which is on autonomous driving, more precisely the DARPA Urban Challenge 2007. Also we have some collaborations with different high-tech companies like Google, in this case it’s a project about 3D-Navigation.

So far I really enjoy working at the ERL. The people are nice, smart and laid-back. And they also offer me a lots of freedom and independence for my work. Actually it’s not work, it’s fun! And also fun is my red, brand-new Beetle convertible, 150 HP (110 kW) with beige leather seats including seat heater and MP3 sound system.

Movies about the DARPA Grand Challenge:

• Google TechTalk by Sebastian Thrun on winning the DARPA Grand Challenge (English)
• A report on RTL SternTV (German)
• A report on Sat1 (German)