Green light for Google self-driving vehicle prototypes

1691 Google has announced the next step in its autonomous vehicle program and is about to begin testing its new prototype self-driving vehicles on public roads. This summer, the company will move its cars from the test track to the roads with safety drivers aboard.

The company has been rigorously testing the cars at its test facilities for several years. The new prototypes are based on the company’s existing fleet of self-driving 4349 Lexus RX450h SUVs, which has logged nearly a million autonomous miles and recently has been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week.

According to Google’s Self-Driving Car Project director, Chris Urmson, each prototype’s speed is capped at 25mph. During this next phase of the project, each vehicle will have a safety driver aboard with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal and brake pedal that allow them to take over driving if needed.

Urmson says, “We’re looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles, and to uncovering challenges that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle, e.g., where it should stop if it can’t stop at its exact destination due to construction or congestion. In the coming years, we’d like to run small pilot programs with our prototypes to learn what people would like to do with vehicles like this. We’ve been running the vehicles through rigorous testing at our test facilities, and ensuring our software and sensors work as they’re supposed to on this new vehicle.”

<%$Linker:2Internal<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><dictionary />4218200oLinkExternalLast weekVisit autonomous car accidents revealed in california page false/categories/location-based-systems/news/autonomous-car-accidents-revealed-in-california/falsefalse%>, Google self-driving cars were reported to have been involved in accidents during testing. Urmson was quick to point out that the 11 accidents were minor and caused by other drivers, saying “11 accidents in 1.7 million miles is a lot better record than most humans achieve.”