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Google Driverless Car Revealed
A couple of days ago, Google revealed the Google driverless car. It’s a prototype, of course and it has no steering wheel and no brake pedals. The vehicle can navigate and drive by itself and you’re merely a passenger.
The Google team behind this project says that their aim is to create a fully autonomous car, because this would improve road safety and help many people who can’t drive, get around easier. The prototype was designed from the ground up; with a simple push of a button it will take you wherever you want to go.
This Google driverless car isn’t Google’s only self-driving vehicle, other prototypes have already racked up around 70,000 road miles already. The only difference between those and this Google driverless car is that they had steering wheels and pedals in case the driver wanted to override the computer’s navigation system.
Google’s latest doesn’t have anything, except a button for start and pullover and an emergency button. Anyone can drive it, or more accurately put, anyone can be driven by it.
How does the care drive itself? Well, there is a sensor on the top of the car that monitors the surroundings at all times in all direction over 180 meters (0.1 miles) away. It’s not just using the camera on top, it combines what it gets from the camera with the information it receives from radar and laser sensors. It virtually has no blind spots, which makes driving it much safer than any driverless car ever invented.
The man behind this project is Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He’s also the co-inventor of one of the funkiest things to ever come out of Google, the Google Street View.
What are your thoughts on the Google driverless car? Would you like to take it for a test drive? Do you think you’d feel safe in it? Is this the future of cars? Drop us a line in the comment section below and tell us what you think about it.
