Google's Self-Driving Car Project Detailed

[nambbus]

Google has made a lot of progress on its self driving car project in the past few years, and just this week it began ferrying journalists around Mountain View in the autonomous vehicles.

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http://www.techcrunch.com/2014/05/14/googles-self-driving-car-project-is-a-worlds-fair-fantasy-turned-city-street-reality/

 

[superdudebuddy]

Google’s new driverless cars: no brake pedal or steering wheel

Google’s new driverless cars: no brake pedal or steering wheel

Google to build its own new self-driving electric vehicles with the potential for use as driverless taxi cabs

An early version of Google’s experimental electric-powered self-driving car.


Humans might be the one problem Google cannot solve. For the past four years, Google has been working on self-driving cars with a mechanism to return control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency. But Google’s brightest minds now say they cannot make that handoff work anytime soon.heir answer? Take the driver completely out of the driving. The company has begun building a fleet of 100 experimental electric-powered vehicles that will dispense with all the standard controls found in modern automobiles.

The two-seat vehicle looks a bit like the ultracompact Fiat 500 or the Mercedes-Benz Smart car if you take out the steering wheel, accelerator, brake and gear shift. The only things the driver controls is a red “e-stop” button for panic stops and a separate start button.

The car would be summoned with a smartphone application. It would pick up a passenger and automatically drive to a destination selected on a smartphone app without any human intervention. Google won’t say if it intends to get into the car manufacturing business or simply supply technology to carmakers, but it says there are plenty of possibilities if it can persuade regulators to allow cars with no drivers. One potential use: driverless taxi cabs.

The front of the car will be made from a foamlike material in case the computer fails and it hits a pedestrian. It looks like a little bubble car from the future, streamlined to run by itself - a big change from the Lexus SUVs that Google has been retrofitting the last few years with self-driving technology.


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[nambbus]

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