How Google's Self-Driving Car Works

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How Google's Self-Driving Car Works




in depth look at how the google self driving car generates data, and drives itself.
 
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or sit on the internet the entire commute to work
 
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Google co-founder Sergey Brin announced at Web 2.0 that Google's next goal for its driverless cars is to go 1,000,000 miles without driver intervention. According to Brin, Google's teams have already amassed more than 1,000 incident free miles without driver involvement.

Up to now, Google's driverless cars have gone 160,000 miles, but with some limited human input. The company admits that there's been one fender bender, but attributed that to human driver error rather than Google's software.

Google would like to reach a point where it's legal for driverless cars to mingle with everyday traffic, but Brin said there's a lot of research and development left to do. Before the technology can be marketable, Google says it needs to be developed to need to a point at which human drivers can ignore the road entirely.
 
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Google to build driverless cars in the U.S.?

In the midst of a longer piece on the top-secret Google X lab, The New York Times drops this bomb: "Google may turn one of the ideas - the driverless cars that it unleashed on California's roads last year - into a new business."

It was just over a year ago when the world first heard of Google's experiments, deploying Toyota Prius hatchbacks in California to rack up test miles of its self-driving vehicle system. Google launched the program in secret, but has since given presentations on the technology and the company's goals for its deployment. Currently, the cars must have a human behind the wheel to act as a potential override to the system, but Google has indicated that it would like the system to get to the point that it operates free of human intervention. Google is currently working towards racking up over a million driverless miles.

While the Times report says that Google is considering building these autonomous cars in the U.S., we've got to believe that this is nothing more than conjecture. Even for a company as large and well-funded as Google, deciding to go into the carmaking business is not something you just jump into, especially not when your sales strategy involves a bleeding edge technology and you haven't shown any desire or aptitude for designing or building nearly any other aspect of an automobile. Autonomous driving tech could be a truly transformative feature, but developing it and selling it to the industry as a supplier would seem to make much more sense, and it would doubtlessly hasten its arrival to the market.
 
and now google is approaching automakers to use their self driving car technology:

Google Inc. wants self driving cars on the road sooner rather than later.

It knows its autonomous vehicles work – engineers have already put its fleet of self-driving vehicles through 250,000 miles of testing. And they're planning to put another 750,000 testing miles on their expanding fleet.

Now, executives are approaching car makers about building the self-driving vehicles, according to The Detroit News.

"From giving the technology away to licensing it to working with Tier 1s, Tier 2s, working with the OEMs, building a car with them, everything is open and we're trying to figure out which paths make the most sense," said Google project manager Anthony Levandowski last week at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress in Detroit. "We're talking to basically every car company to see what their level of excitement is and how do we work with them."

A Google spokesperson later added, "We're talking with lots of auto companies about a variety of topics, but we haven't decided how we may make our technology available to consumers. As Anthony said at the SAE conference in Detroit, 'all options are open.'"

Levandowski says Google is racing forward to get self-driving vehicles on the road as soon as possible. It has begun talking to insurance companies to figure out how much it might cost to insure a self-driving car, according to CNET. One of the sticky issues: If a self-driving vehicle causes an accident, is the driver responsible or the company that made the vehicle?

Google officials say they expect to mathematically prove that computer-driven vehicles are safer than those operated by humans, thus insurance prices should be lower. No word yet if that logic will fly, but insurance companies do love math, algorithms and actuary tables...
 
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