We’ve already heard of Volkswagen and General Motors experimenting towards driverless cars, and now Google has joined in.
Google? What the search engine?
Yes indeed. Their involvement stemmed from their camera cars travelling around the world taking pictures of people’s front yards.
But now this technology has gone a lot, lot further.
We have already seen some embryonic “driverless” options move into production – adaptive cruise control is one example, but that’s nothing compared with the latest on road research.
Google seems to be a step ahead of the rest, though, as they are working with Stamford University and a talented engineering team headed by Sebastian Thrun who was the co-inventor of Google’s street mapping cameras.
They have five Toyota Prius cars and have logged nearly a quarter of a million kilometres in varied road conditions in California, including the winding streets of San Francisco.
Thrun has a very personal motivation in all of this, having lost a close friend in an auto accident when they were teenagers. He explains his motivation and shows some vivid pictures of the driverless cars in motion in this YouTube clip.
It’s very impressive, as it seems to be able to handle all conditions, city back streets, freeways, night and daytime traffic and some pretty fancy obstacle courses at racing speeds.
But will it happen?
One thing’s for certain, there are plenty of pluses – better use of road space, much improved traffic flows, less stress (if you can stand being in the passenger seat with no driver) and better use of time.
But what if there’s a glitch – a software failure, a bug in the system? Can you imagine the mayhem?
Sadly there are many road fatalities everyday, but it only needs one to occur from a software malfunction to put a big question mark on the whole project.
What do you think? Will it happen in our lifetime? Can you sit back and have nobody drive?