Of those, 12 have been rear-end collisions – and have been mostly found to be the fault of the human drivers who were following.
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Afterward I also had a chance to ride in Google’s prototype of a self-driving vehicle.
That information would help shed light on exactly what happens when self-driving cars get into accidents, which Simpson said is important since the testing is happening on public roads – largely in the Bay Area, though Google recently expanded its testing grounds to Austin, Texas. But for the daily drudgery of metro commuting – Brin says the average work commute is 50 minutes – the Google car’s technology will be a revolution.
According to The Huffington Post, these vehicles were involved in 16 accidents from May 2010 to August this year.
Twenty-odd years later, this hat-shaped thing rolls up to us in the rooftop parking lot of one of Google’s Mountain View, California buildings.
“There are a variety of benefits and the appeal for any individual will be different than it is for another consumer”, Carlson says.
If the technology advances as Google plans, the only people sitting in driverless cars by 2020 will be passengers looking for an easier way to get around.
Then, there was another test where Google made someone leap out of a truck-bed while it was moving in front of the self-driving vehicle. The firm says it will be working with established carmakers to take its self-driving cars public.
But, thankfully, we don’t live in Google’s driverless world, and all driverless, autonomous cars – when they arrive in the real world – will have to deal with the reality, which is that the vast majority of cars will have a fallible human driver behind the wheel. Along with twice abruptly switching back to manual mode, a brief, jarring moment unfolded as we approached a stop sign on Greenlawn Parkway.
Mr. Fairfield logged the incident on a laptop and said Google would study it to consider changes to the computer instructions that guide the vehicle. In those tests, and in every other one, the cars send their data from the interaction to a “scenario database”.
With the latest Google fleet expansion, there are now 102 autonomous vehicles licensed to take to the streets in California.
“We clearly are a little jerkier than we would like”, he said.
After we hit a “Go” button on the main console, and sat through a brief countdown, we were off on an automated course. At first, the screen was nearly entirely black because Google has not mapped out the Alamo Drafthouse parking lot on West Anderson Lane to the detail needed for its self-driving software. They break traffic laws, too.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has programmed the cars in a way that they can spot potential danger and brake instantly. That way, autonomous cars send other drivers the same signals a normal vehicle would.
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“It’s just unnatural and freakish”, Mr. Fairfield said. However, that’s the one thing missing since the whole essence of the driverless auto is that it has no driver. Otherwise, at four-way stops it might continue to wait until the intersection was clear.
