We follow autonomous cars quite closely, especially seeing that this could be the future of driving. Following our recent article on the safety record of Google’s other self-driving fleet, Google is now ready to unleash the little bubble car on the world; well the streets of California in the Mountain View area this Summer.
Since last September, Google has let a fleet Lexus RX450h roam the streets of California; equipped with the same self-driving technology. Together, they have clocked up near 1 million autonomous miles on the public highway, nearly 10,000 a week. The total amount of autonomously logged data is comparable to the experience of “75 years of typical American adult driving”.
The cool thing about autonomous driving, all of the data logged by the previous cars can be instantly uploaded to the new cars, with certain parameters changed such as vehicle size to give better spatial awareness. If that isn’t enough to calm you, then each car will have a human occupant with the control to override the system if needs be.
Following the recent news and criticism of Google’s self-driving cars, namely the Lexus models; Google has made statements to set the record straight. “Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel,” wrote Google’s Chris Urmson in a recent post on Medium, “and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident,” a Google representative said.
Apart from the awful looks of the car, would you be willing to let one drive you around? What about actually owning one when the are released? Let us know in the comments
Thank you to ArsTechnica for providing us with this information.
