Personal Injury Law

Google developing fleet of self-driving cars

By Ryan Bradley, Esq.

Science fiction films and literature have often been overly ambitious in predicting what our day-to-day lives will be like in the future as technology progresses. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's version of 2001 projected our ability to explore space to be a little more advanced than what the reality of 2001 brought us. Back to the Future's hoverboard technology also seems out of reach. Countless movies have also shown a future where cars are no longer subject to human error and drive themselves.

I don't know about space travel or hoverboards, but Google thinks they've figured out the self-driving car, and the benefit to society in terms of limiting car accident injuries and fatalities could be huge.

The high profile tech company has been secretly working on the automated car project using a fleet of modified Toyota Priuses and one Audi TT and has recently let information on the project go public. The cars they have developed have already driven 140,000 miles, some of that with limited human interaction and some completely automated. They've even gotten permission from local police departments and have run the cars on actual city streets with actual city traffic.

Since they've taken them on the road, there's only been one minor accident, and that occurred when another driver rear-ended one of the automated test cars. Google engineers are always in the car to monitor the vehicles and take over if things look unsafe.

The cars use a combination of radar, laser guidance, and video cameras to map out the surroundings and read street lights.

Human error is by far the number one cause of traffic accidents here in Missouri and around the country. If the technology for self-driving cars advances to the point that it becomes a standard feature on many vehicles and also commercially viable, we could see a big decrease in the number of accidents.

Of course, the sci-fi vision of highways full of automated cars is still a long way out. Estimates vary, but the Google self-driving car could be in development for another eight years or more.

Full post as published by Missouri Accident Lawyer Blog on October 11, 2010 (boomark / email).