Remember when Google wanted to keep its autonomous-car crash interventions under wraps? The tech giant is now keeping some of its testing private, as well, as its cars are driving around with no human aboard.
According to Forbes, onlookers at a park near Google’s Mountain View, Calif. caught sight of the company’s car sans passengers, but were ushered aside by security so as no hard evidence of testing could be posted online.
As for why the commuter pod was tooling around with no soul to keep tabs on its progress, a likely idea, according to writer Mark Rogowsky, is an autonomous taxi being used by transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft whenever the car’s owner isn’t using it. A report by Morgan Stanley cited by Rogowsky states that a car is used for only 52 minutes per day, sitting idle the rest of the time. Were a vehicle to be put into service by a TNC, it would see more road time, providing more transportation options in so doing.
Though Google isn’t in a rush to bring a product online tomorrow, automakers like General Motors, Mercedes and Tesla will press ahead with partial-autonomy tech, which could arrive as soon as 2016. Meanwhile, the main piece in the puzzle — a 360-degree laser — continues to fall in price, recently dropping from $85,000 to $7,999. Rogowsky believes another 80 percent to 90 percent price cut will come in the near-future, helping to reduce the overall cost of autonomy.
Just curious because I don’t know, but what are the legal ramifications of operating a vehicle sans onboard driver? Any existing laws around this that anyone is aware of???
I’m certain numerous cash-strapped municipalities will have no difficulty determining the legal remunera – excuse me: the legal ramifications of autonomous vehicle operations.
What is this “laser” they speak of? Just more pie in the sky foolishness that will never have any commercial application.
It’s a laser rangefinding system (LIDAR). That’s how the car can “see” what’s around it. These things are amazingly accurate and fast, but there’s no way you could build a consumer vehicle with a single part that costs $85,000 or anything near that. There’s an arms race to build cheaper LIDAR systems, and once those come on the market, you can expect them to show up in all sorts of autonomous or semi-autonomous cars.
@Dan Wallach These things are amazingly accurate and fast,
Actually, they don’t have the resolution needed for building an autonomous car. Read some of the more in-depth articles where the Google team admits those issues. I don’t have a link, but if you search around, the articles are there.
LIDAR is only a small part of the problem and doesn’t provide all of the data needed to build an autonomous system. When we do get a system, the core of the implementation will probably be implemented on the IBM Synaptic architecture – the only way to process that much data quickly.
Oxford University is using multiple lidar scanners at the corners of the vehicle. I’m planning on adding a few of Sony’s new 44.0 x 33.0mm CMOS image sensors feeding into the synaptic processors – but there’s a huge, huge amount of work to be done.
I’m baffled.
This is near San Francisco? In a park? And, people were ushered along by security?
Something is missing because the You Tube videos of protesting citizens screaming at the “jack booted” security “thugs” wasn’t attached to the story.
Oh , wait. Oh, no. We better
Can you sent it to the store for beer? Seriously, it would be great for stuff like that.
“Hey you, auto’bwana; go fetch us big beer, MANY BIG BEER; GO NOW!!!”
There’s talk in Europe of allowing autonomous drive in the car-connected sense, primarily aimed at preventing collisions, and that Google’s fully autonomous drive may well conflict with that. Some argue that Google’s window of opportunity to push its autonomous drive as the leading standard is rapidly narrowing, perhaps already vanished.
Nothing like a good unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable accusation to stir up the comments section.
google and other ‘visioners and humanity saviours from ‘spookey valley’ .. ‘the circle’ is almost complete..