A Car drive without human driver...
Now Google is road-testing cars that steer, stop and start without a human driver, the company has confirmed.
Aim is to "help prevent traffic accidents, free up people's time and reduce carbon emissions" through ride sharing and "the new 'highway trains of tomorrow,'" project leader Sebastian Thrun wrote on Google's corporate blog.
The cars are never unmanned, and a backup driver is always behind the wheel to monitor the software.
It is not the first signal that Google wants to change how people get from place to place. In a speech on September 29 at the TechCrunch "Disrupt" conference, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "your car should drive itself. It just makes sense."
"It's a bug that cars were invented before computers," Schmidt said.
The cars have travelled a total of 140,000 miles on major California roads without much human intervention, according to Google's corporate blog. The cars know speed limits, traffic patterns and road maps, Thrun's posting says, and use video cameras, radar sensors and lasers to detect other cars.
The technology giant has sent seven test cars a total of 1,000 miles without a human touching the controls at all, the New York Times reported.
Driving between Northern California and Southern California, the cars have navigated San Francisco's curvy Lombard Street, Los Angeles' Hollywood Boulevard and the cliff-hugging Pacific Coast Highway, the blog says.
The New York Times said engineers consider the cars safer because they react more quickly than humans, and Google has not revealed how it hopes to profit from the research.
"The word 'focus' is a word Google has never learned," Enderle said, pointing to projects involving electricity distribution, vehicle design and artificial intelligence. He said cars that can drive themselves would allow commuters more time to surf the web, something Google would encourage.
Let’s go with Google Car….
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