Self Driving Cars Could Reach Ordinary People in 5 Years

Self Driving Cars Could Reach Ordinary People in 5 Years

California on Tuesday September 25, 2012, became the second state after Nevada to allow road testing of Google's self driving cars, with standby human drivers.

Gov. Edmund "Jerry" Brown signed into law a bill authored by State Sen. Alex Padilla at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

The bill, SB 1298, allows framing of rules and regulations for qualifying an autonomous car for road testing.

Speaking to the press at the event, Google CEO Sergey Brin said he expected autonomous vehicles to be available to "ordinary people" within five years.

"You can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this," he said.

However, Bin stressed that the road ahead was still long and arduous.

"Safety is a huge challenge for us. That's one of the most difficult things that we undertake from a technology point of view, because there are never enough 'nines' in terms of getting things right," Brin said.

"What happens when a computer breaks down, or when the tire blows out or something unexpected happens? We spend night and day fretting about all sorts of rare possibilities, and I'm optimistic that we're going to be able to solve [these issues]," he said.

"It's dealing with every possible eventuality," he said, "and we're dealing with a long list of eventualities."

But humans have overcome those challenges before, he added. "For instance, for airplane flight."

Among the benefits of the self driving car, Bin cited

1. Less accidents because computers are more accurate, always follow the rules and react faster than humans.
2. Less congestion on highways because cars will be able to drive closer to each other as computers can react faster than humans.
3. Autonomous cars will allow people with disabilities or temporary impairments to be safely on the road.

"Some people have other disabilities, some people are too young, some people are too old, sometimes we're too intoxicated," said Brin.

According to Bin, Google's cars have logged about 300,000 miles of road testing.

He acknowledged there have been incidents that have prompted the accompanying safety driver to intervene but just one documented accident, a fender bender that took place while a human was in control!

Some test cars have driven 50,000 miles without "safety-critical intervention."

There were nearly 33,000 deaths from motor vehicle accidents in the United States in 2010. Nearly a million people die in road accidents across the world.

According to CNN, other organizations, including Caltech, have been working on autonomous cars.