Google's Robot Cars Already Outperform Humans

Chris Urmson, head of Google's self-driving car program has made the claim at a robotics conference in Santa Clara that its self-driving Prius and Lexus cars are already safer steering themselves than with a human behind the wheel.  He presented the results from two studies on data collected from hundreds of thousands of miles driven by the vehicles on public roads in California and Nevada in the last three years.  Urmson mentioned that in his regular contact with automakers, he has found that many of them are working on self driving cars themselves.   Urmson believes that legal and regulatory problems will not pose much of a threat because states like California, Nevada, and Florida have adjusted their laws to allow testing to take place and he believes that the data will be able to prove their safeness to people.  At the conference, Urman showed data from the only Google Car that had been in an accident.  The car's annotated map of its surroundings showed that it had correctly halted before it was rear-ended.  Use of this data could make it much easier to tell what had happened in an accident without having to rely on unreliable eye witness accounts.

The fact that many automakers are developing their own self-driving cars along with Google's history of innovation makes it very likely that this technology will hit the consumer market in the future.  How soon will depend on what policy makers and their constituents deem as the minimum metric for safety to allow them on the road.  The expensive Lidar (laser rader) systems that are installed in these self-driving vehicles allow them to map out the area around them and will paint a picture of what happened before an accident.  The manufactures are liable for any crash that their vehicles cause which gives plenty of incentive to make sure that their vehicles work as flawlessly as possible.  Insurance companies will greatly influence drivers to use the new technology as AI will always beat human cognition.  Drivers likely will be penalized for switching into manual driving mode and I bet there will be conflict over someone not trusting their car in a a situation and causing a crash manually.  It will take time for people to adjust like any technology, except everyone on the road will be effected whether they like it or not.  Production has greatly been increased for many of the parts required by the autonomous vehicles.  One company, Continental projects that it will more than double its production of radar systems from 4.5 million to 10 million units by the year 2015.  The rise of the autonomous car is imminent, it will be interesting to see how the public and policy makers react to the new technology.