Google You Can Drive My Car

I gotta say, I called this one. Last weekend, the word got out that Google has been, in fact, planning to drive your car. They have been building and road testing (yeah, testing on streets you are also driving on) computer-driven cars for, well, as long as it takes to log 140,000 miles.

Google said on their blog, 'Our goal is to help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions by fundamentally changing car use.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

Our automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps (which we collect using manually driven vehicles) to navigate the road ahead. This is all made possible by Google’s data centers, which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by our cars when mapping their terrain.'

They also go on to say that the cars were never 'unmanned' and that a person was always read to take over if something went wrong.

This kinda reminds me of the movie Demolition man. Where people never swore, Taco Bell was the best and only restaurant in town, and the bathroom had '3 shells' instead of TP. Cars also drove themselves at a touch of a button. I like to drive, so this new technology would have to be optional, Google. Make a note.

While they technology is said to be 5-8 years away, it's very exciting. We are living in a time when we can visually create and share our 'far-fetched' ideas...and then watch the world turn so quickly that we see them come to life. Now if Google can only figure out how those 3 Shells work. ~ p