Google Self-Driving Car For Daily Commute
Written by Sue Gee   
Wednesday, 08 August 2012

Google's driverless cars are coming up to a new milestone. In future there will be just one human tester from the project team in each car.

According to the latest Google blog on the topic, Google's driverless cars have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing and without a single accident when under computer control.

Up until now each car, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, has carried two project team members. The next step is for there to be just one human in each car and the cars will clock up more miles in situations such as commuting to work.

The blog states:

To provide the best experience we can, we’ll need to master snow-covered roadways, interpret temporary construction signals and handle other tricky situations that many drivers encounter.

The daily commute therefore seems a good way to put the cars, including the recently recruited Lexus RH450h, through the rigors of everyday driving conditions.

 

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For now, Google say, team members will remain in the driver’s seats and will take back control if needed but personally I'm looking forward to the day when I can sit in the back seat enjoying the landcsape (or more likely working on last minute preparation with my laptop or Andriod) on my way to a meeting and, freed from the need to find a parking space, simply request that the car picks me up again once it is over.

So keep motoring Google so that we can all benefit from self-driving cars soon.

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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 08 August 2012 )