Google’s Self-Driving Prius Crashed
The overhyped Google‘s self-driving Prius crashed recently bringing some bad press for the new car. The funny part is that Google says that Google’s self-driving Prius crashed while a human was behind the wheel. Stupid humans, robots would have never made a dumb mistake like that, geez.
Google’s Self-Driving Prius Crashed | History of the Car
Nightrider has become a reality ladies and gentlemen, if you aren’t familiar with Google’s self-driving car, let me school you in Google’s latest futuristic endeavor.
First of all what you are probably wondering is why Google created this car in the first place. Why not, its cool! But really here’s what Google has to say about the motivation behind the self-driving Prius:
“Thrun, who is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-inventor of Google’s Street View service, said that the company’s goal is to prevent traffic accidents, give people more free time, and reduce carbon emissions by changing the way people use their cars.”
Last year, long before Google’s self-driving Prius crashed, or was even on the road, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted at the TechCrunch 50 project as saying, ” that he believed self-driving cars would eventually do a better job of driving than people.”
Google’s Self-Driving Prius Crashed | How They Work
According to VentureBeat the car pretty much works like this:
“The cars use radar sensors, video cameras, and a laser range finder which helps them detect other traffic. They also take advantage of detailed maps, which are collected by Google’s manually driven vehicles. The company is working with engineers who’ve taken part in the DARPA Challenges — autonomous vehicle races put together by the U.S. government.”
Google hopes that this robot car can prevent the over 1 million annual car fatalities that occur in the US every year. So the fact that Google’s self-driving prius crashed isn’t the best of news for the web giant.
Google’s Self-Driving Prius Crashed | How It Happened
Female robot? No, and it’s terrible you would think that.
Apparently some stupid non-robot was manually driving the car nearby Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters when he rear-ended another Prius and thus Google’s self-driving Prius crashed into a non-self driving Prius while two humans were behind the wheel. I know it sounds ridiculous just typing this story, it literally feels like the world around me has turned into an episode of the Jetsons.
Luckily no one was really injured when Google’s self-driving car crashed, it was only a fender bender.
Google’s Self-Driving Prius Crashed | The Future of the Cars
Apparently seven of these bad boys have already driven over 1,000 miles without any human operating it.
As far as the future of the cars go, there is a lot of speculation in the tech world. Here is what the folks at VentureBeat are predicting:
“The project is certainly a major new step into robotics for Google, although the company doesn’t yet know how it will create a business from the automated cars. Google may be able to sell its information and navigation services to autonomous vehicle makers, or it might sell or give away the navigation technology itself, according to the New York Times.”
So I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, in the meantime let the robots do the job this is why Google’s self-driving Prius crashed in the first place.