Google Road-testing a Really Smart Car

I'm not sure what to think about this new self-driven car that Google is trumpeting. The self part of that self-driven doesn't mean you drive and no one else in the car. No, it means that the car is driving itself.

See Google is always on the lookout for new markets. This time round, they're looking to get into the AI road software business. Now, I'm not sure if this is just another opportunity to showcase Google Ads — theoretically, if you're in the car but you're not driving, you could be a captive audience for more Google Ads on your laptop, smartphone, dashboard, rear view mirror, makeup case mire, or whatever other kind of screen you could see from where you sit.

This happens now, with passengers. If Google is driving your car for you, then you're no longer the driver but are instead a passenger, free to make phone calls, surf the Web, answer email, tweet, write a blog post, record a Facebook update, or whatever else you might do in the Web 2.0+ generation.

But back to the car. So the system has a host of cameras, inside the front seat area and strapped onto the roof (in a setup that looks a bit like Darth Vader's fighter ship), and these cameras feed all kinds of information back to a central computer that does the rest.

This isn't exactly a new thing. Automated vehicles have been on the roads for years. This particular project has had seven test cars logging more than 1,000 miles with no human intervention whatever. The number of miles in which a human has to step in occasionally (such as to wait for a pedestrian who was taking an extremely long time to cross the road at a crosswalk or to avoid cyclist who had carelessly run a red light) is well over 100,000. So these folks know what they're doing.

This latest test involved a human-free navigation of Lombard Street, San Francisco's famously windy street. That test went off without a hitch — or a crash or even so much as a dent.

Google also reports having a Prius driving a preprogrammed route up a major highway in the middle of traffic for a distance of 35 miles. A human was behind the wheel but had to do nothing other than monitor traffic. The AI software did the rest, including braking, accelerating, and even changing lanes. (The car, of course, drove the speed limit the entire time.)

Where does this leave us? Probably not as close to the Jetsons as we might think. Still, it's probably closer to that sort of thing than most people realize.