Google: Self Driving Cars – They’re Here!

Granted, it’s 2010, and we’re still not whizzing around in our own personal spaceships, but we’re getting to the point where we might soon be able to take a nap on our way to work, at least. That’s something.

Honda has been testing an “autopilot” system for a while, but this is taking things a bit further;

Google has been testing the self driving car for a while now, on the roads of California (yes, we do count the Prius as a car, aware of the controversy…). NYTimes has this to say about the ordeal:

“The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.”

They are, according to the Times, “smarter than you think”, but that might still be far from “as smart as they should be”, and Google admits as much. They’re pretty hopeful, though;

“Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has.”

“Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated, the engineers argue. They speak in terms of lives saved and injuries avoided — more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008. The engineers say the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together. Because the robot cars would eventually be less likely to crash, they could be built lighter, reducing fuel consumption.”

So. No more lives lost, less fuel consumption and no more high speed chases… especially after the government gets its hands on this and modifies it so that LE can switch it off at will. Then, in a while, we can start discussing computer viruses – ehm, car viruses, that is.

[ad name=”pages-ad”]

All in all, though – this actually looks very interesting, also because testing has come far enough to take it into real traffic. Google says the only accident that happened with their car was when someone rear-ended it at a stoplight…

By the way, Google says they started testing this recently, but here’s a video that’s about a year old – and though we’ve only seen the Prius’es in photos, there’s rumors of an Audi TT too.

About Author

SnällaBolaget

See author's posts