Google recently announced on its official blog that their innovation, the world’s first ever self driving vehicle, has received the green light to be used on public roads!
Unfortunately, the new cars won’t be available all over the globe yet, because Google will be trying them out in California’s Mountain View area first. While testing the self driving cars over a period of six years, Google’s cars experienced as low as eleven accidents within that time. This strengthens the argument for self driving cars eliminating the majority of road traffic accidents as most of these are due to human error.
The self driving vehicles will be limited to driving up to a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour (that’s about 40km/h), and the best part about it is that every single car will include a safety driver, who can take control over the vehicle with an on-board wheel, accompanied by the brake and accelerator pedals (these are all removable), so if you think that the car isn’t doing its job well, you can take control.
The testing period was intense, as Google wanted to make sure that every sensor and every single piece of software and hardware worked perfectly.
The impressive thing is that Google’s vehicles managed to drive for almost a million miles (this is equivalent to more than seventy years of a persons driving experience), ramping up the frequency of driving gradually to about 10 thousand miles every week. This means that the self driving vehicles now have a lot of experience, but logically speaking are designed to continually be able to learn more. Google’s current software gives the car the functioning ability as the one used in the Lexus RX450s SUV line of vehicles.
Seeing how Google’s vehicles will react to unnatural occasions, like deciding when or where to stop, or even reacting to unexpected road diversions caused by construction projects will be interesting to find out.
As this doesn’t resemble a full-rollout, nor is this project completely finished, all of you that don’t live in Mountain View will simply have to wait a while for these vehicles to hit the streets.
For now, we all hope that the self driving cars have been properly crash tested,and that consumer version become available soon.. And even though it’s only a two-seater vehicle, this is surely a great start for autonomus vehicles!
