Google's Driverless Car

A car with a top speed of 25 meters per hour, two seats and no steering wheel might not make much of an impression at a motor show. But Google, in the US, sent a shock through the car and taxi industries as it unveiled the latest version of its driver-less car.The electrically powered vehicle, which Google has started testing around its headquarters in Mountain View, California, dispenses with all the normal controls, including foot pedals. Instead, it has a smart phone app that calls it and tells it the destination, and a single STOP button between the two front-facing seats in case the passengers need to override the computer.

The car, in fact, does all the tasks of navigation, steering, acceleration and braking.The company is building about 100 prototypes for a two-year test. The company’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, told a conference in California that the vehicle was still in the prototype stage but that the project was about changing the world for people who do not have good transportation today

Google says that the aim of the project is to improve safety and that, because the car is constructed with impact absorbing foam at the front and a plastic windscreen,it should be far safer than any other car for pedestrians.The cars, which have been built specially by an unnamed company in Detroit, will be used to find out how best to make driver-less vehicles work. Google will run a pilot program using the cars, which are not yet for sale.One challenge is creating high-definition scans of the roads and surroundings before the cars can drive along them because they cannot collect and process enough information in real time.So far, there are high-detail maps of about 2,000 miles of California’s roads, but the state has more than 170,000 miles of public roads.Google says it is interested in licensing the technology to traditional vehicle manufacturers once it has been refined.

Other car makers, including Volvo, Ford and Mercedes, are working on driver-assisted vehicles, which, unlike Google’s version, do not dispense with the driver controls.

So far, the Google versions of the self-driving cars have driven 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the computer. The company says that thousands of people die each year on the roads and that about 80% of crashes are caused by human error.