First, Google wanted to bring you search results. Then they wanted to bring you your TV, phone and even potentially your broadband. Now it seems that the ever expanding horizons of the Google engineers have been set on driving you to work.
Not that an actual engineer is going to be popping round to your house at seven in the morning with a bacon roll and cup of coffee. Google are looking to the future by testing out some driverless cars. Although not a completely new concept – driverless cars have already been tested across Russia and by the US military – Google putting their weight behind a project generally signifies a real effort to take the technology forward.
And what technology it is. The very concept seems futuristic, like the kind of auto-drive features found in cars from films such as Minority Report or iRobot. If the next step after this is iRobots then surely Google’s would have a different name. iRobot sounds more like an Apple brand.
Google’s cars took their maiden voyage this weekend with a great deal of success as the seven cars have already clocked up 140,000 miles as they navigated Los Angeles and San Francisco unimpeded. Of course the seven cars where fully manned just in case, but the only accident occurred when another driver drove into the back of one of the test cars at a traffic light making quite a poignant point of man versus machine.
The cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser rangefinder in order to avoid other vehicles and navigate the turns identified on their route. A top Google engineer Sebastian Thrun suggested in a blog entry at the weekend that this technology could drastically reduce the number of motor accidents that occur every year as well as increasing car sharing and reducing energy consumption while giving people the opportunity to work more productively. There are of course other things you could use this extra time for such as a quick kip before work, but each to their own.
It’s compelling stuff that could quite possibly revolutionise transportation in the future, but at this time it is still clearly a long way off. However, with the concept of an ‘Android’ car being funded by one of the largest technology companies in the world it is certainly an exciting prospect. Just make sure you don’t hit the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button or you might be calling in late.
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