Steve Jobs took away our keypad. Google does the same with our steering wheel!
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) each year 1.2 million people die in traffic-related accidents. And over 90% are caused not by machine error, but human. At one of TED’s conference talks Sebastian Thrun shared that he’d wanted to build a self-driving car ever since his best friend died in a traffic accident when they were teenagers. Google have taken this project seriously and they are working hard on improving people’s lives by developing a self-driving technology that can contribute to a much safer road environment.
On their official blog, Google shared that, to date, they have driven nearly 700, 000 miles using the autonomous technology. The cars they used were Lexus SUVs and Toyota Priuses that were fitted with radar sensors, video cameras, and laser range finders that helped the cars observe other traffic as well as obtain information from the maps of manually driven cars.
This Tuesday, however, the co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, announced at a Re/code conference (#codecon) that Google are releasing about a 100 prototypes of their own self-driving cars. These vehicles will have no steering wheel, no brake pedals, nor accelerator pedals. The only things you’d find in there are a start/stop button, a screen, depicting the route, space for your belongings and two seatbelts. They are equipped with sensors that remove blind spots and, also, gather information from the road ahead at a distance of more than the length of two football playing fields. Not having a steering wheel or pedals (and other essential things for a car) allows the Google team to insert more sensors, radars, cameras, and so on, which would make a drive from point A to point B even safer. There are two drawbacks of the little car: its design and its speed limit of 25 mph. But, as the Google team say, they built this little Googler as part of a learning project and not for luxury.
Basically, all people would have to do is get in, set their desired destination and do anything else but driving. The US Transport agency calculated that, on average, Americans are stuck in traffic for 52 minutes each day. Imagine what you can do with that time when you don’t have to be paying attention to the traffic ahead? Here are some suggestions:
- You can read your favourite book or read just about anything that tickles your fancy.
- You can sleep on your way to work.
- You won’t have to look for parking space – you just get off the car and it does the rest.
- You can communicate with the person next to you, fully aware and paying attention to the contents of what they are saying – your partner, children, relative.
- You can check our Facebook page for interesting posts (or, you can think of some interesting status update).
- You won’t need a driving license.
- You won’t have to worry about having had too many drinks with your colleagues after work.
We are going to follow Google’s self-driving car project (#GoogleSelfDrivingCar) because it’s an idea that will definitely contribute to happier lives. Also, start saving up for your child’s car fund because Google are planning on releasing the cars for public use at some point between 2017-2020.
That’s it for now. If you have any other ideas how we can use a driverless car, we’d like to hear from you in the comment section below.
All the best,
The NavTech Team
NavTech Group 