Will We Even Need to Teach Our Kids to Drive?

Will Google’s driverless car mean we’ll be the first generation of parents who don’t do driving lessons?

Who remembers learning to drive with their parents? From shaky bunny hopping, nervous steering and crazy stop-start antics, it’s a wonder that our parents survived the stress. Now this rite of passage may soon be a thing of the past thanks to the Google’s new driverless car.

The dinky new two-seater Google prototype, looking like a cross between a squished VW Beetle and a Fiat 500, will feature absolutely no driving controls at all. No steering wheel, no brake and no pedals, meaning the car will be completely autonomous. Passengers will just need to hit the power button, input their destination and sit back and let the car do the rest.

The car drives itself through a combination of motion sensors to detect speed and direction, radars to detect surrounding objects and a GPS receiver linked through to a customized version of Google maps, so it always knows where it’s going.

When are we going to be able to get our hands on a driverless car?

So far Google has only road tested the car on the streets around Google headquarters in Mountain View California, where the roads have been mapped specifically for purpose – with details such as kerb height and location. These ultra-precise mapping details are required to make sure the car has all of the information that it needs to keep on the road. Google has mapped 2000 miles of Californian roads to the specifications needed to support the Google car, but with over 170,000 miles of roads in California alone, there’s still a while to go to cover the globe.

Despite the small area covered so far, Google aims to have 100 of their autonomous cars on public roads by next year, following extensive testing. However, these cars won’t be for sale, instead they’d be available to select operators for further tweaking and will have a top speed of just 25 miles per hour.

But while it seems that Google is almost there on the technology front, the biggest delay to the release of the Google car may well be the law. There will need to be a whole new shift in legislation to support the notion of a completely autonomous car. For example, if the car is involved in the accident, who would take the blame - the owner or Google?

Do you think that the driverless car will be available by the time our kids are ready to drive?

Source : parents[dot]nickjr[dot]com[dot]au