Google's New Car Doesn't Even Have A Steering Wheel

 Self-Driving Cars  

Google has built a self-driving car of it's own. The two-seater prototype of the vehicle was unveiled Tuesday by Google CEO Sergey Brin during an onstage interview at the Recode Code Conference.

As was long suspected, Google has built its own car, and it is self-driving.The two-seater prototype vehicle is Google’s concept of what the automobile of the 21st Century should look and feel like if you took the human out of the transportation equation and designed something solely to deliver passengers where they want to go.

"The project is about changing the world for people who are not well-served by transportation today."

“The project is about changing the world for people who are not well-served by transportation today,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the inaugural Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “There’s not great public transportation in many public places in the United States.”

The car — which was conceived and designed by Google, unlike the ones it previously modified — lacks many of the trappings of a normal car, and that includes the three essentials: A steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake pedal.

For the demonstration of it's self-driving car functional prototype, Google even put blind drivers 'behind the wheel.'

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"In a normal car there’s power steering and power brakes, and if the power steering fails, as a strong person you can use your muscles as a fallback to still steer the vehicle," Google Self-Driving Car Head Chris Urmson told re/code. "In our car there is no steering wheel so we have to design really fundamental capabilities. So we have effectively two motors and they work so if one of them fails the other can steer, so the car can always control where it’s going, and similar with brakes."

An earlier demonstration by Google's Self-Driving Car Project team showed how the vehicle depend on a Google-made topographical map to get a sense of what it should expect. The map includes the height of the traffic signals above the street, the placement of stop signs and crosswalks, the depth of the sidewalk curb, the width of the lanes, and can differentiate lane markings from white and dashed to double-yellow.

The Google working concept prototype has no mirrors, only a backseat, the glove compartment and the stereo. There are plenty of sensors, and a version of the self-driving software system Google has built to use it's existing fleet of self-driving vehicles that have been racking up the miles on  highways and city streets over the past five years.


SOURCE  re/code

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