Tag: self-drivingcar

Google’s cars have driven 1.2 million miles without getting a ticket

This afternoon Aleksandr Milewski posted a picture that suggested the ticket-less streak might come to an end, but now Google says its car was flagged down because it was going so slowly. These new prototype models are classified as “Neighborhood Electric Vehicles” and have their speeds capped at 25mph, so they stick to slower-moving streets. The officer had some questions about the car, which is apparently common for the cartoony vehicles. According to Google, its self-driving vehicles have driven 1.2 million miles, or the equivalent of 90 years of experience for an average person — and probably still can’t get an insurance discount. Source: Aleksandr Milewski (Facebook) , Google Self-Driving Car Project (G+)

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Google’s cars have driven 1.2 million miles without getting a ticket

Google’s driverless cars skirt deer and pedestrians in Texas

By the looks of things, Google’s self-driving cars have been learning a lot in Austin, Texas . In its first report since it began testing autonomous vehicles in the city, the company details the challenges its cars have had to face while driving on its roads. For instance, they’ve been spotting and avoiding a lot of deer, some of which might have ended up as road kill if they happened to come across ordinary vehicles instead. The system also had to learn to identify new infrastructure, such as horizontal traffic signals. Google has learned, however, that one of the major problems it has to tackle is pedestrians stepping off the curb onto the road while hidden by other vehicles. On August 20th, a Lexus unit was rear ended after spotting a person starting to cross the road. See, its human driver took over to make sure he doesn’t end up harming anyone, but it turns out — based on the footage of the incident — that the accident wouldn’t have happened if he just allowed the car to brake on its own. Clearly, Google’s doing what it can to achieve its original goal of developing autonomous vehicles that can drive better than humans. In addition to discussing what it has learned in Austin, Mountain View has also revealed through the report that it’s deploying more of its egg-like prototype models in the city this September. Filed under: Transportation , Google Comments Via: USA Today Source: Google Tags: google, googlecar, self-drivingcar

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Google’s driverless cars skirt deer and pedestrians in Texas

Volvo plans self-driving cars in 2014, envisions accident-free fleet by 2020.

Long hailed as one of the safest car producers in the world, Volvo hopes to retain that reputation by introducing vehicles that can avoid passenger injuries on their own by the year 2020. Its plans hinge on eliminating the largest cause of road accidents — the drivers themselves. The head of development for the program is convinced that driver-less cars are the future and that Volvo will be the first one there. The main technology underpinning Volvo’s autonomous automobiles is wireless internet, which would enable each car to be assigned a certain point on the road and give different vehicles the ability to interact with each other. The company is preparing to release an initial batch of autonomous vehicles, capable of speeds of up to 31 miles per hour, in 2014. We know from the SARTRE project that the automaker has been able to achieve autonomous speeds of 53 miles per hour in traffic for long distances, though they aren’t disclosing when those higher-speed prototypes would be publicly available. Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: Autopia (Wired) Source: Driver’s Seat (WSJ)

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Volvo plans self-driving cars in 2014, envisions accident-free fleet by 2020.