In his "Ghosts In The Machines" column in the February 2015 Car and Driver, John Phillips (whose mood and writing seem to have improved considerably since some kind soul rescued him from that Romulus and Remus life he was living with the wolf pack) noted:
"Last month, I was driving our long-term KIA K900 on I-90 past Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana. The adaptive cruise control was engaged at 75 mph. My feet were perhaps six inches from the pedals, and I held the steering wheel with one hand.
There was no traffic in front, none behind, none in the opposite lanes. That's when
the car, wholly unbidden, braked violently. Loose items in the ****pit rocketed forward, and the seatbelts cinched to chest-flattening pressure.
My wife cried out, and I was so thunderstruck that I couldn't think how to react. I recall saying, "What?" a couple of times, which did surprisingly little to mitigate the crisis.
Then I decided to pound the brakes--bleeding more speed, maybe to as little as 20 mph--which disengaged the cruise control. That corrected the problem, although I achieved this result with no greater purpose than to cease being startled.
If an 18-wheeler had been tailgating, well, the Kia would be MIA."
He went on to discuss the infamous automated Air France Flight 447 Airbus A330 crash of May 2009 and how three pilots misdecisionatored the controls.
"What the hell is happening?" "We don't understand anything!"
Trial lawyers' delight.
Again the media hypes Google for something I don't see it playing much of a rule in the future. I can see them being something like a supplier or someone who license their tech but I don't see them getting involved with building and engineering cars. I see their approach will be like their involvement with in car entertainment. Building components that go into them.
This is a company that has no history in anything as regulated or complex as the car market. Obviously that doesn't mean they can't do it, but would they. The automotive sector is no where close to being a core competency for Google. Far from it in fact.
That thing is very ugly......no, it is waaaaaaaaay beyond ugly. It is uber-fuggally.
I wouldn't want to be in it when it was broadsided by a Silverado.
I think it will take a very long time for more than a handful of people to want one.
But, no more accidents and tickets on your drivers license because you won't even need a license as you don't drive it. They can just give the tickets to the google thingy for agrivated mis-programming.
Anyway, it is new and interesting technology.....but maybe not. I seem to remember GM making driverless cars that followed each other around a track years ago so maybe that was the start of this driverless technology.
Just some thoughts.
You don't want to be in ANYTHING broadsided by a Silverado.
There will HAVE to be a responsible, licensed adult aboard these cars. They will HAVE TO have manual overrides.
These cars will demand and result in a spaghetti-like tangled complexity of state and federal statutes and guidelines.
The irony of the term "computer crash" is not lost on cars completely controlled by computers.
As others have stated I don't see Google getting into the business of building cars. I do see them licencing their technology and software services to car companies.
If they were to get into the car business they would likely buy out a small to mid-sized established auto maker. Something like Mitsubishi
As is well-stated above, Google is not a car company.
Cars are complex beings. Emotional purchases.
Their Google car looks like something from Aaahnold's "Total Recall" driven by bots, to be decapitated :fall: by angry customers when they don't respond properly.
The tort attorneys are drooling :dro: at the prospects of a deep-pockets company like Google driving blindly into a liability minefield like computer-driven cars.
You have to notice the new drugs hitting nationwide TV ads every week.
You have to notice some of those same drugs hitting nationwide TV tort attorney ads a few years later. "Have you been damaged by this drug...?"
