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Google’s driverless car prototype has been around for a couple of years now—but have you ever spotted one in the wild? We just did, and it’s equal parts insane, terrifying, and hugely cool.
Our Brent rose saw this car, whose driver is not touching the wheel, cruising down highway 80 in Oakland. “She was not using hands at all. Somebody next to her had a laptop so clearly it was just testing but pretty awesome. They didn’t kill us or anybody else.”
They’re out there. Don’t cut them off. They are driven by robot brains—and unlike an Apple Car, this thing does know how to follow you back home.
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OH SHIP
Oh no, a car with a far better safety record than most human drivers, how terrifying! Seriously, if tech blogs can’t embrace this, what hope do we have?
Far better safety record than most human drivers? Where are you getting your info from? Say I’m an average driver and I’ve done about 50,000 hours of driving. How many hours has the google car driven on the road in real world conditions so we can compare safety records?
The best source I can find is this one: http://goo.gl/RM6w5
And there has been no documented crash while the computer was in control. So they’ve no been driving enough to give a full idea of there safety, but the 300,000 with no incident is a great start. Couldn’t find anything I’d call reliable on how often people crash while driving so I can’t compare.
I’m not disagreeing with you, but you’ll never find the data to back up your data. Unless Google releases information on how many times their drivers have to intervene, then we’ll never have comparable data sets.
Although the ‘drivers’ aren’t driving, they’re still there and I would guess are required to be fully alert to avoid disaster. They may never intervene, or they may have to do it whenever somebody breaks a little too hard in front of them – we have to remember that this is still prototype tech.
I took a rough guestimate and saw a 1.5 second gap to the lorry in front. I was about to be quite critical, then I realised that with a computer in control, that’s probably plenty of distance (UK highway code specifies a minimum of 2 seconds of gap, and more in dodgy conditions).
Nice video stabilisation.
But in all seriousness, this is pretty amazing. As much as I want to actually do the driving myself (I’m not old enough yet), I can’t wait to see these cars out on the roads.
Google makes new car. Out of jelly.
Oooh spooky!
The fear about these cars is understandable. As soon as you put a computer in charge of something that our lives depend on, serious trouble becomes even more of a possibility. Software glitches, hackers, viruses all come into the equation. Humans make mistakes and create accidents, but so far human brains can’t be hacked.
True, but we’ve been using computers to control passenger airliners and military jets/tech for some time. I the only issue is when some geezer called Kevin decides he can service his self driving car in his garage
Do you remember the time a virus infected computers at air traffic control at an airport and for a moment there was much panic until they got the systems under control again? This was in the UK a good few years ago.
True, there are occasions where computers go wrong, but since cars tend to be isolated from each other, the possibilities of a virus spreading are reduced.
And with current stats of around 36 road deaths per week in 2011, it may help.