Also, the original impetus came from the DARPA grand challenge.

However, Google do deserve credit for recognising that self-driving cars could have a massive positive impact on society, and bringing the various team members under one roof and funding them would bring the concept from the research lab to the road a lot quicker. I bet many car makers have stepped up their self-driving cars efforts in response to the Google advances.

There's numerous companies and organisations that had the resources to bring the likes of Sebastian Thrun into their fold to work on self-driving cars, but Google were the ones with the vision to actually do it.