What its like to not drive Googles driverless car
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Google has finally lifted the veil of secrecy from its driverless car.
The firm allowed reporters to take a trip around Google's HQ in Silicon Valley.
The project's boss urged people to 'embrace' the car, which has caused safety concerns.
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A Google self-driving car, a white Lexus, cruised along a road near the Google campus, braking for pedestrians and scooting over in its lane to give bicyclists ample space as the firm let journalists ride in the car for the first time.
GOOGLE'S CAR STATS
Mean streets: Google cars have driven about 700,000 accident-free miles (1.1 million km) on motorways in 'autonomous mode'. Google has been focusing on city driving for the past year.
To-do list: Google's Lexus RX450H SUVs are retrofitted with lasers, radar and cameras rapidly learned how to handle thousands of urban driving situations. Improvements are needed in merging and lane changes, turning right on red and handling bad weather.
Local tests: So far, the tech giant has focused on street driving in Mountain View, California. The state, along with, Nevada, Florida, Michigan and Washington, D.C., have formally opened public streets to testing of self-driving cars.
The future is (almost) here: In 2012, Google co-founder Sergey Brin predicted that the public would be able to get hold of the technology within five years. This prediction has not been revised.
Google, the carmaker: While Google has enough money to invest in making cars, that likelihood is remote. Industry experts believe more likely options include collaborating with major car makers or giving away the software, as Google did with its Android operating system.
A fleet of Google's robot cars ferried more than two dozen reporters around Mountain View, California, on Tuesday, in 30-minute ride-alongs that showcased their ability to automatically and safely navigate around city streets packed with cyclists, pedestrians and traffic signs.
The demonstrations, along with a morning of press briefings by Google managers developing the technology, marked the company's most concerted effort to date to provide an up-close look at the cars conceived five years ago in its secretive Google X division.
The public needs to understand that a self-driving car is 'not something that you need to fear but something you need to embrace,' said Ron Medford, a former National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration official who is now director of safety for Google's self-driving car project.
'We do find that when people experience it, we get remarkable results and responses,' Medford said at the event at the Computer History Museum, during which Google explained the technology that makes the cars work.
What Google's car sees: An interior view of a Google self-driving car showing the video and the data the car uses to 'see' the road.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin tout the driverless car as revolutionary technology that could eventually sharply reduce fatalities on the road.
'You can count on one hand the number of years until people, ordinary people, can experience this,' company co-founder Sergey Brin said in 2012.
He made the remarks at a ceremony where California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation legalising the cars on public roads in the state.
WHAT IT'S LIKE TO 'DRIVE' GOOGLE'S CAR
It would be hard to mistake the gold Lexus RX 450h cars that Google has converted into self-driving prototypes for normal cars, primarily because of the roof-mounted laser sensor that revolves 10 times a second, gathering a 360-degree view of the car's surroundings.
Other drivers who spot the self-driving car often swerve in front of it and tap on their brakes, hoping to gauge the Google car's reaction, according to the two Google staffers in the car's front seats.
Another favorite involves car drivers waving their hands in the air, in an attempt to get the Google driver-seat staff member to take his or her own hands off the wheel and prove the car is really steering itself.
'We just laugh at them,' said one of the Google staff members in the car.
From the car's backseat, the ride feels little different from sitting in a taxi.
The car's speed, the distance it maintains from the vehicle in front and its handling, for the most part, feel completely ordinary.
Changing lanes occasionally feels sharper than typical, and the car slowed down at a green light at one point until its sensors were able to 'read' a traffic light that was apparently mounted at an odd angle.
The Google staff member in the driver's seat never took control of the car, other than the initial passage through a speed bump-laden parking lot, and once again on arrival.
Alexei Oreskovic, Reuters
But it remains to be seen whether it's ready for widespread use.
Lately, some of Google's ambitious 'moonshot' projects have stirred unease.
Google Glass, a postage stamp-sized computer screen that attaches to eyeglass frames and is capable of recording video, has raised privacy concerns.
For self-driving cars, consumer acceptance and regulation may be as much issues as perfecting the technology.
HOW GOOGLE'S DRIVERLESS CAR WORKS
Sensors including radar and lasers create 3D maps of a self-driving car's surroundings in real-time, while Google's software sorts objects into four categories.
These include moving vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and static objects such as signs, curbs and parked cars.
Initially, the car's capabilities were fairly crude. A group of pedestrians on a street corner registered as a single person.
Now, the technology can distinguish individuals, according to Google spokeswoman Courtney Hohne.
To deal with cyclists, engineers initially programmed the software to look for hand gestures that indicate an upcoming turn.
Then they realised that most cyclists don't use standard gestures - and still others weave down a road the wrong way.
A camera peers out from the front grill of Google's self-driving car in Mountain View, California, as Google revealed exactly how the car works
Engineers have taught the software to predict the behaviour of cyclists based on thousands of encounters during the approximately 10,000 miles (16,000 km) the cars have driven autonomously on city streets, Hohne said.
The software projects a cyclist's likely movements and plots the car's path accordingly - then reacts if something unexpected happens.
'A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area,' Urmson wrote.
Before recent breakthroughs, Google had considered mapping all the world's stop signs.
Now the technology can read stop signs, including those held in the hands of school crossing guards, Hohne added.
Google will not say whether it will build its own cars or license the technology to automakers, nor will it provide a firm date for when the cars will be available.
Co-founder Brin has said the technology could be available by 2017.
Google's cars have never 'caused' an accident in self-driving mode, although they have been involved in a few fender benders, such as an incident in which a Google car stopped at a red light got rear-ended, said Chris Urmson, the head of Google's self-driving car project.
Unlike human drivers, self-driving cars never get drowsy behind the wheel, and they can react to unforeseen situations much more quickly, he said.
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