Google’s self driving cars take to city traffic

After driving thousands of miles on the streets of Mountain View, Google said yesterday that its self-driving cars could now navigate through everyday driving situations including traffic signals, curbs, pedestrians, cyclists and other hazards of city streets.

Nevertheless, it would be a long time before self-driving cars arrived at dealer outlets. There are numerous regulatory issues that remain unresolved, as also the need for more rigorous testing.

San Jose Mercury News quoted Brian Blau, research director for consumer technologies at the Gartner research firm as saying it was going to be several years before people trusted those kinds of vehicles.

According to Google, the cars it had programmed to drive themselves had started to master the navigation of city streets and the challenges they brought, from jaywalkers to weaving bicyclists - a critical milestone for any commercially available self-driving car technology.

However, despite the progress over the past year, the cars need to a lot to learn before 2017, when the company hopes to get the technology to the public.

Traditional automakers however, had been less bullish and had rolled out features incrementally, including technology that braked and accelerated in stop-and-go traffic or technology that kept cars in their lanes.

Associated Press quoted David Alexander, a senior analyst with Navigant Research who is specialising in autonomous vehicles as saying he thought the Google technology was great stuff, but he just did not see a quick pathway to the market.

According to his projection self-driving cars would not be commercially available until 2025.

Google's self-driving cars can now comfortably navigate freeways, however, with a driver ready to take control. The project's leader said in a blog post that cars could now handle thousands of urban situations that would have stumped them a year or two ago.

''We're growing more optimistic that we're heading toward an achievable goal - a vehicle that operates fully without human intervention,'' project director Chris Urmson wrote. The benefits would include fewer accidents, since in principle machines can drive more safely than people.