Google Wades in Self-Driving Cars; Any Takers?
The icon of search engines Google Inc, thinks the future is of self driving cars and exchanging words with auto makers to develop the cutting-edge technology.The futuristic company says that the most important thing computers can do in the next 10 years is to drive a car and the company is eager to see self-driven cars on American roads. Google is going to make an official announcement as early as next year; however the company is not itself interested in producing cars, therefore the technology will be passed on to the Mountain View. This California based company will then form an alliance with one of the auto majors or it could manufacture parts to supply to the auto manufacturers.
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As the automakers are also foreseeing it happening and they want to be the ones to introduce this technology . As per the stats, Google noted that 90% of the accidents happening are a result of human error; self driving vehicles are aimed to reduce death on roads rate. There are about 32,000 people dying because of car crashed with a total of about $200 billion loss in annual societal costs. The company needs to prove mathematically that the self driving cars are much safer and makes few mistakes as compared to the cars that are run by humans. Also the company predicts that the car is going to be rolled out in market in less than a decade time.
The Internet giant said that its self-driving cars on average complete a test course a couple of seconds faster than human drivers. Google is also in talks with insurance companies to make this project a reality and the company is unsure about whether it will have to provide some insurance to the initial buyers using this system. The company would also have the power to deactivate its self driving system as the company is going to keep a check over where and when the technology is working. Google has logged about 250,000 miles in a fleet of about 10 cars, but wants to have a log of about 1 million miles before the technology goes public. Google self-driving cars at present are retrofitted Toyota Prius with additional sensors and camera.
Google does not want to rule out human driving but wants to make it safer and as questions were raised regarding a driver-less car could also crash, the company replied that it won’t move forward if the data doesn’t depict that self-driving cars are more safe than people. General Motors is also testing a driver less car for almost five years and the company unveiled a prototype in the year 2008. The company is also said to be road testing semi-autonomous technology christened as “Super-Cruise”, that comes with a full automatic steering, braking and lane centering in highway under given optimal conditions and could be ready for production by mid 2020.
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