A Look at Google Driverless Cars

The Google Self-Driving Car, powered by Google's innovative program Google Chauffeur, is certainly making waves in the driving world. With human error accounting for the vast majority of automobile crashes, as well as older drivers losing the ability to drive as well with confidence, it seems like the Google Self-Driving Car is the all-around cure for human-on-human road rage and traffic accidents.

Sebastian Thrun, Google engineer, is the current Self-Driving Car project leader, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-inventor of Google Street View. He created the robotic vehicle "Stanley" back in 2005, winning that year's DARPA Grand Challenge and its $2 million prize from the United States Department of Defense. The team that developed that particular system consisted of 15 Google engineers, including Chris Urmson, Mike Montemerlo, and Anthony Levandowski.

State legislation has been successfully passed to make Google Self-Driving Cars street legal for four U.S. states (California, Nevada, Florida, and Michigan), as well as Washington, D.C., with a third state legislation currently in review for stating criteria in the state of Texas.

Google engineer and project team member Urmson says, "We're spending less time in near-collision states. Our car is driving more smoothly and more safely than our trained professional drivers." This statement was prompted by the official road test in which the Google Chauffeur program was placed in the computers of a Prius and Lexus, and proved that while the professional drivers had sharper turns and brakes, the Google Self-Driving Car program proved to run more safely and smoothly through common road obstacles and general routes through a closed test driving course.

Despite the promising applications for people everywhere who are unable or otherwise gradually losing the ability to drive to remain mobile, there are safety concerns among the general public about how truly safe the Google Self-Driving Car will be in the long run. Seapine Software composed a study in February among 2,000 U.S. adults, and the results revealed that about 88% of them would be concerned about driving in a self-driving car, with the main cause for concern being a software malfunction or safety glitch. "We found, not surprisingly, that safety was the number one concern that survey respondents noted for their reluctance to adopt driverless technology," said president and CEO of Seapine Software, Rick Riccetti. "That means that until manufacturers - in this case Google - can prove, without a doubt, that their product is free from software glitches or failures there simply won't be a market for them for the average consumer."

Despite the obvious questions of safety, as well as more liability-related issues, such as who would be at fault in the case of a potential collision between two driverless vehicles, it's clear that only time will tell in the case of this new technological innovation.

As it is, prices are expected to be sky high for the potential first prototypes to be sent off the assembly line, which means that wealthier people with higher vehicular budgets will be more likely to experience it first before the average American gets a shot at it. The technology alone is estimated to cost more than $250,000 per vehicle - but like with the smart phone, perhaps we do need the wealthy to test the newest and latest gadgets for bugs before we get our hands on them.

Despite the negativity surrounding the cost affordability and potential safety bugs, the general buzz and excitement surrounding the unveiling of the Google Self-Driving Car is a good sign that, once we've reached a point that the appeal of the driverless vehicles is virtually flawless, more and more Americans will gradually begin to adopt this groundbreaking technology.

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