Tuesday, October 12, 2010

A car that drives me? Sign me up!

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently announced that the search engine giant is actively testing autonomous cars and has already logged 140,000 miles with its test autos.

The way these cars work is through the use of sensors, video cameras and laser range finders in tandem with info collected by manually driven vehicles that Google has sent out to various map routes. The automated cars is then relayed the info gathered by the other cars after it is processed at Google’s data centers.

One of the primary goals of these cars is to, not only, cut energy consumption but to also cut the amount of deaths currently caused by traffic accidents (roughly 1.2 million people per year). Google hopes that with these cars, traffic accidents can mostly be avoided; because even when a human doesn’t see something coming, the car will and will then act accordingly.

Although these vehicles are self-driving, none of them have yet to make a journey without a driver present to take over and additionally, police officers have always been told as to what is going on when tests have been conducted.

If you're interested in more info, you can read more about it here - LINK! And although skeptics think that a fully automated car is a long way off, I'm still hopeful, I would love to be able to sleep my way through my commute.

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