Ever since we started the Google self-driving car project, we’ve been working toward the goal of vehicles that can shoulder the entire burden of driving. Just imagine: You can take a trip downtown at lunchtime without a 20-minute buffer to find parking. Seniors can keep their freedom even if they can’t keep their car keys. And drunk and distracted driving? History.
We’re now exploring what fully self-driving vehicles would look like by building some prototypes; they’ll be designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention. They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don’t need them. Our software and sensors do all the work. The vehicles will be very basic—we want to learn from them and adapt them as quickly as possible—but they will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And that's an important step toward improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people.
http://googleblog.blogspot.kr/2014/05/just-press-go-designing-self-driving.html
From On theVerge:
On Tuesday night, onstage at the Code Conference in California, Brin revealed an entirely new take on a self-driving car, one decidedly more ambitious than anything we've seen before. Google's as-yet-unnamed car isn't a modified Lexus. It doesn't just park itself. It's an entirely autonomous vehicle, with no need for steering wheels or gas pedals or human intervention of any kind. You can't drive it even if you want to.
Self-driving cars are coming. That's essentially a given: the technology already mostly works, and nearly all automakers believe autonomous vehicles are both a good and feasible idea. They disagree only on the timing, though "by 2020" has become an increasingly popular refrain. The biggest remaining challenges appear to be regulatory rather than technological, as governments start to answer questions like who's responsible when a self-driving car gets in an accident.
This is only the beginning, of course. Google's not shy in admitting its cars have trouble in rain and snow; they'll work nicely in a consistent and comfortable climate like Mountain View's, but the mountains of Lake Tahoe might prove another story. And they sure as hell can’t drift. And for Google's car to be the future of cars and not of golf carts, the company will need to solve for those and countless other problems around the world.
Eventually it's going to work, though, even if by the time autonomous vehicles hit the mainstream they'll more likely have a Ford or Nissan logo than a Google Doodle. (Brin himself mentioned taking a "partnership approach" for the tech.) Google doesn't have the scale, the infrastructure, or likely the desire to enter the car market in a real way. But Google's hardware moves, from the Chromebook Pixel to Google Fiber to Project Loon, have never been about sales. They're about proving what can be done, about pushing the limits, about making us think bigger and differently about what's possible.
Even if only 100 ever see the road, Google's car will force lawmakers to finally figure out what happens when cars stop helping us drive and starts truly driving us. It will force automakers to think two steps further down the self-driven road than they had before. It will force customers to get used to the idea of not owning a car, and the notion that it's actually more convenient doing things the Uber and Zipcar way. It’ll teach us to think of cars as public transportation, a service provided for us. Even if we're years away from the wide availability of the technology it's now clearer than ever that's what a "self-driving car" really means.
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