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Google has announced the launch of a driverless car that could make the highways a safer place. The car prototypes have a built-in software, namely the one self-driving Lexus RX450 SUV uses for its car designs.
The project has reached almost a million autonomous miles across the roads since it started and the car is presently self-driving about 10.000 miles per week.
The Google driverless car team has tested its device for an equivalent of 75 years of typical American adult driving experience. This speaks in very high terms about its reliability and capacity to stay out of highway trouble.
Company officials announced they will be able to use the car on public roads in Mountain View this starting this summer. However, there will also be a number of safety drivers in case trouble arises.
By now, chances of accidents have been limited to almost zero in the driverless car case, with Google creating a state of the art piece of modern technology. Human tasks and social behaviors seem to be slowly replaced with smart machines that can do all the driving for us.
We will be able to choose whether we want to drive or not, because the driverless car can always take control of the driving. If we don’t feel like driving, we can press a button, take the right seat and reach home in safety.
Google declares that its autonomous vehicles can easily reduce up to 94% of car accidents that are mostly caused by human error. Still, their driverless cars have been involved in 11 accidents on the roads. All cases were described as a cause of “useless human drivers”.
The Google Driverless car owns a 25mph speed cap and is provided with classic driving tools such as steering wheel and pedals.
The projects is still in its testing phase and it won’t come to light in the near future. This is though a very interesting perspective on the way we will be able to control a significant part of our lives – the driving hours. Studies show that we spend 235 hours driving every year, the equivalent of six working weeks. The Google Driverless car is here to help us enjoy our driving hours from the passenger’s seat.
The car will hold the steering wheel for us, will slow when necessary without our intervention and will recognize road hazards without us seeing them first. It is the first vehicle built from scratch for the future of driving. But the future will not happen yet, because it doesn’t have any safety equipment so it cannot go up with more than 40 miles per hour, has to be recharged after 128 Km and can only drive in Google mapped areas.
It’s still a question of years until we take our hands off for good from the classic, old-school steering wheel that puts the drivers stamp on some of us.
Image Source: dailymail.co.uk
