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| The boot of Audi's robot car Shelley is packed to the brim with position monitoring equipment |
The most popular bumper sticker at the parking lot of Google’s self-driving-car project, reads “my other car drives itself”. Looking at what is happening in the world, I would out my rooster's neck on the line and predict this sticker will be the reality in by 2022 - that's a decade from now.
Google TT and Prius has been (legally) self-driving themselves out on Nevada’s roads for more almost a year in 2012 .
Which means that the next time you’re in Vegas, don’t skrik if the taxi arrives with no one behind the wheel. And Google is not alone in its mission to give people robot cars.
A BMW drove itself down the autobahn and Jeremy Clarkson around the Top Gear track. At speed.
Audi built a robot car, named it Shelley after famed Audi rally racer Michele Mouton, and sent it up Pike Peak. Shelley the robot car climbed the 20-kilometre, 4,3 km pass in a respectable 27 minutes — just 10 minutes longer than the average human time. The Volkswagen automotive innovation laboratory at Stanford University has built Junior 3, a Passat that steers itself.
At the Tokyo Auto Show in November, Toyota unveiled its Prius automatic vehicle operation system (Avos), which can be summoned remotely. GM’s Alan Taub now predicts that self-driving cars will be on the road by the 2020.
Apart from relieving the tedium of commuting, removing the nut behind the wheel also makes driving safer. A lot safer.
Google’s system — which sets the standard — analyses and predicts everything that passes the car 20 times a second.
While a racing driver’s brain still works faster, the machine will beat the human every time when it comes to reacting to those brake lights.
Of course the machines can now talk to one another so that traffic can move like train- wagons or even insect swarms across a city, with no human-delayed reactions that are the main causes of traffic jams and bumper bashing.
