14 DAY TRIAL // It's no secret that Google is working on a lot of technologies in a number of fields, from green tech to aerospace engineering. You can add a new one to the list, Google has just revealed that it has been working on self-driving cars for the past few years.
Lead by Sebastian Thrun, a Google engineer who also heads the Standford AI lab, the project has been in the works for a while now with the autonomous cars totaling 140,000 miles driven.
"[W]e have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard," Thrun explained.
"They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles," he added.
With 140,000 miles driven on public roads in California, it's safe to say that this is the biggest experiment in the field to date. Of those 1,000 miles are completely autonomous, i.e. without any human intervention.
The cars are able to make complete journeys, through city and highway traffic and handle scenarios like cyclists popping up in front of the car or other unexpected obstacles.
Google's technology is built by some of the best engineers and researches to participate in the DARPA Challenges, a competition for autonomous vehicles.
It may be a little out of Google's regular fields of interest, but the promise of self-driving cars is hard to ignore for anyone.
Google says that the technology has the potential to radically change the every-day lives of billions of people around the world. The roads would be safer, because there would be fewer accidents, the traffic more fluid, since all the cars would be aware of each other, and there would be less greenhouse gases emissions since the cars would drive more efficiently.