14 DAY TRIAL // It is well known that Google is working hard to improve its autonomous cars before releasing them on the market.
Since many people were quite reluctant at the thought of having the driverless cars around them, fearing for their safety, Google came up with an idea meant to reassure them.
Quartz reported that Google engineers are currently working on designing a revolutionary method which will drive insecurities away from those who ever had second thoughts about the whole idea. We all know that most cars have a safety device called airbag, which is designed to inflate in case of collision and protect the driver and the passengers.
We also know that most airbags are designed inside the car. Google, on the other side, is planning to set up the airbags on the outside in order to protect pedestrians and to deploy when the car senses an imminent crash, be it with a person or another car.
But Google does not plan to use the same materials which are generally used to make airbags for regular cars as that might hurt pedestrians even more by throwing them in the air and back on the ground. So Google has come up with the idea of bumpers made of visco-elastic material.
It is, however, unclear what exactly this could refer to, but Quartz speculated that it could “be of a consistency somewhere between that of an earplug and memory foam.”
Why is Google trying so hard to make people think its car is safe?
It is only natural for Google to want to fortify people’s confidence in its driverless cars, especially since people were excited at the news but quite hesitant about actually using them.
So far, no major accidents have been reported from using them, with Google even trying to convince people that human-operated cars actually cause more accidents than autonomous ones.
The only notable incident with a Google car, at least from what was revealed to the public, was the one from 2010, when one such car rear-ended at a traffic light. However, Google strongly denied that the there was no driver inside the car, on the contrary, they claimed there was a human being driving it and that he was to be blamed.