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Uh-Oh: Google Develops Self-Driving Vehicles

October 11, 2010 / aaaaahh!, autonomous, cars, deathtrap, do not want, driving people off cliffs, driving you into a river, google, i'd rather take my chances with a chauffeur (and tank), not sure how i feel about this, robo-cars, uh-oh, we're all gonna die

cat-drivers-would-be-cooler.jpg

Google, a company best known for originally being named Booble, has been secretly developing self-driving vehicles behind our backs. Also, testing them on the roads of California without warning. Pull over, you're under arres....WTF!?

Google announced Sunday that it has developed cars that drive themselves automatically in traffic, and that it has been testing them on the streets of California for months.


Each car is manned during the tests. One person sits in the driver's seat, ready to take control of the vehicle instantly by grabbing the wheel or touch the brake should something go wrong with the system. The person in the passenger's seat is an engineer who monitors the software operations on a computer.

The most optimistic projections put this technology at least eight years away from market, though. Legal hassles are among the myriad problems; all of the current traffic laws assume that a human driver is present in the vehicle.

Google put over 140,000 miles on the self-driving vehicles with only a single accident -- getting rear-ended by a driver (presumably female) at a stoplight. BOOM -- sexist driving joke! (Says the man who has to pay $260/month for car insurance)

Google is testing cars that drive themselves [cnn]

Thanks to Braden, slugamo, Patrick and Bret, who agree teaching cats to drive would be way cooler. Plus safer if you can train them to not chase squirrels.

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