Report: Google Partners With Ford To Make Self-Driving Cars (yahoo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A new report from Yahoo Autos says Google and Ford plan to announce a partnership to build self-driving cars. "By pairing with Google, Ford gets a massive boost in self-driving software development; while the automaker has been experimenting with its own systems for years, it only revealed plans this month to begin testing on public streets in California. Google has 53 test vehicles on the road in California and Texas, with 1.3 million miles logged in autonomous driving. By pairing with Ford, the search-engine giant avoids spending billions of dollars and several years that building its own automotive manufacturing expertise would require. Earlier this year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said the company was looking for manufacturing partners that would use the company's self-driving system, which it believes could someday eliminate the roughly 33,000 annual deaths on U.S. roads." Automotive News reported on the same plans independently, saying, "It isn't clear whether Ford would design a purpose-built vehicle for Google or supply a standard production car fitted with the sensors and computers that the car needs to guide itself down the road."

Comments

Already being done

[sjbe]

I still don't understand, why we don't have self-driving trains already

We already do. You could have found that out in under 20 seconds on google. It's being implemented on normal railways too.

the task is so much simpler with one-dimensional roads, no size/weight restrictions on the necessary equipment, and full control of the signs and signals

I think you may be underestimating the complexity of train operations. Nevertheless the cost of a person to operate the train is much smaller in comparison to a car. Trains already do have a lot of automation and are getting more all the time but the financial potential of automation isn't nearly as large as with automobiles.

Re:Why not self-driving trains first?

[PopeRatzo]

I still don't understand, why we don't have self-driving trains already

We do. The elevated trains in Chicago went from four employees to three to two down to one, who is basically just there for emergencies.

They won't do unmanned self-driving trains because people would freak out if they didn't think there was at least one human manning the train. Not everyone is enlightened as we few, we happy delusional few, we band of nerds who actually believe we're all going to be riding in self-driving cars in our lifetime.

It's the same with airplanes. There's no need for pilots and co-pilots on commercial passenger airlines any more. But take the pilot out of the cockpit and a lot of people ain't gonna fly anywhere.

1.3 million miles relatively tiny number

[Anonymous Coward]

An average taxi driver will rack up 70,000 miles a year, so any individual taxi driver who has been in work for 20 years has more miles under his belt than Google's entire project.