Google testing self-driving Lexus on Austin streets
Posted: Jul seven 2015 04:27PM CDT
Updated: Jul seven 2015 05:56PM CDT
Flying cars are not fairly here yet. But we do have a Lexus that drives all by itself, thanks to Google.
Google says Austin has been selected as its next location to test their self-driving car, a project that commenced in 2009.
The company is hoping it will save lives.
"Every year 33,000 die in the United States due to car accidents. That's the equivalent of a seven hundred thirty seven falling out of the sky five days a week," Interiano said.
Dr. Kara Kockelman is a professor of Transportation Engineering at UT.
She's been researching self-driving cars for years, looking at the benefits, costs and their effect on society. She's actually been in the Google cars.
"They've got safety engineers on board who can instantly control, they usually have somebody in the driver's seat," Kockelman said.
Dr. Kockelman says Google's research in Austin will be very detail-oriented.
"They have fine information on the roads but they've truly got to get it down to the lane, they've got to get the curbs, they've got to get kind of the radius of the curbs. None of that information is generally available so it takes a sort of 3-dimensional resolution of everything that's around them," Kockelman said.
So what does the future hold? By 2030, Dr. Kockelman says cars may roll off of the assembly line with no steering wheels or pedals.
"I think a lot of cities and entire states will at some point outlaw manually-driven vehicles. So it could be in a downtown very first where they don't want to have anymore pedestrian collisions and they indeed feel that they can trust these vehicles far more," she said.
At Google's unveiling of the Austin Lexus on Tuesday, UT student Yannik Rohrer dropped by with his dog Mylo to check it out. The technology fascinates him.
"When you take every single person that's driving a car sixty minutes a day and you convert them all to reading books, educating themselves instead of driving. and you're preventing those deaths! Yeah that's going to switch the world man," Rohrer said.
Mayor Steve Adler says "Austin is special in part because we welcome fresh technologies that could help improve our daily lives, and we can lightly see the potential self-driving cars have to reduce accident rates and congestion, and to provide mobility for people who can't get around lightly."
Police Chief Art Acevedo is on board too, telling "Keeping Austin's roads safe is one of our highest priorities, so we look forward to observing how self-driving car technology might someday improve traffic safety."
