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Google: Our Robot Cars Are Better Drivers Than You

An anonymous reader writes "At a robotics conference in Santa Clara, California, the head of Google's autonomous car project presented results of a study showing that the company's autonomous cars are already safer than human drivers — including trained professionals. 'We're spending less time in near-collision states,' he said. 'In addition to painting a rosy picture of his vehicles' autonomous capabilities, Urmson showed a new dashboard display that his group has developed to help people understand what an autonomous car is doing and when they might want to take over.' This follows another (non-Google) study earlier this week that found the adoption of autonomous cars could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars each year. Urmson also pointed out that determining liability for an accident is much easier using the data collected by the autonomous cars. At one point, a test car was read-ended, and the data showed it smoothly braking to a stop before being struck. 'We don't have to rely on eyewitnesses that can't be trusted as to what happened — we actually have the data. The guy around us wasn't paying enough attention. The data will set you free.'"

2 of 722 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Show time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    call me when your injured and they want one of these to drive you to the hospital. then tell me how you think of these "autonomous" cars. i'm alive because someone put me in their car as kid and drove me to the hospital as a kid doing 80 the entire drive. believe me these things are going to kill people and the makers are going to be all "it's a flawless system"

  2. Re:Autopilots by cascadingstylesheet · · Score: -1, Troll

    If you had read TFA, you would have noticed that the robot car operates more safely than humans in the highway infrastructure that is in place today. We don't need to redesign today's infrastructure, if we switch over to autonomous cars.

    'cause TFA is never wrong, especially if it is by the people selling the stuff.