Over 100,000 miles covered, including driving over the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Google Intelligent cars may have a person sat at the wheel should anything go wrong, but to all intents and purposes they have been self-driven by software around California streets.
Why on Google Earth would they do this? It’s nothing to do with search engines, has no immediate potential to add to the billions that Google rakes in from Adsense, and it’s potentially a PR nightmare should they squash a cat.
Well part of it is because they can. They have the technology and mapping from the Google Street View cars in place. Another reason is to pioneer something other than search engines. Mr Thrun, an employee of Google who posted on the self driving cars, is a computer science engineer and insisted that improvement of road safety was top of the agenda. He points out that over a million people are killed on the roads every year, and that the Google tests so far have only produced one non-fault incident.
Police are informed of the driving routes for the auto-pilot cars, which are mapped out by Google employees beforehand. The cars have also experienced nice drives around Lake Taho and the streets of San Francisco.
Like with the search technology they have produced, this is not only exciting for the North American company, but a potential source of income to cover the costs incurred when preparing the Google Maps tool. At present the majority of Google’s income is from the Ads network, and resources such as Google Earth and Google Maps have only ever eaten into profits.
Pioneering self drive cars is both exciting for the search giant itself and for the future generations of car users, but perhaps not those who like to drive.
