Related: California legalizes self-driving cars
Self-driving cars now legal in California
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Driverless car now legal in California
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Gov. Jerry Brown signs a bill that will regulate self-driving cars in California
- Google co-founder Sergey Brin hopes to have self-driving cars on public roads within five years
- Brin says self-driving cars address safety, traffic and lifestyle issues
Gov. Edmund "Jerry" Brown signed the autonomous-vehicles bill into law
Tuesday afternoon alongside Google co-founder Sergey Brin and State
Sen. Alex Padilla, who authored the bill, at Google's headquarters in
Mountain View, California. The bill, SB 1298, will set up procedures and
requirements for determining when the cars are road-ready.
Brin hopes that self-driving cars will be able to drive on public streets in five years or less.
"Anybody who first gets
in the car and finds the car is driving will be a little skittish. But
they'll get over it," said Brown when asked if the California Highway
Patrol was on board with the plan.
CNN test-drives 'self-driving car'
Google's self driving Prius
The cars use a
combination of technologies, including radar sensors on the front, video
cameras aimed at the surrounding area, various other sensors and
artificial-intelligence software that helps steer. Google is the most
visible company working on these types of vehicles, but similar projects
are under way at other organizations, including Caltech.
Google has already been testing the cars on the road in Nevada, which passed a law last year authorizing driverless vehicles. Both Nevada and California require the cars to have a human behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle at any time.
So far, the cars have
have racked up more than 300,000 driving miles, and 50,000 of those
miles were without any intervention from the human drivers, Google says.
There have been no
accidents while the cars were controlled by the computer. The only
documented accident with one of the Google vehicles was a fender bender
that took place while a human was in control.
Brin, who sported a pair
of Google glasses at the media event without comment, said the cars
could address a variety of current transportation issues. First and
foremost, he said, the self-driving cars would be safer than
human-driven cars. There were just under 33,000 deaths from motor
vehicle accidents in the United States in 2010.
They also could ferry around people who are usually unable to to drive, such as blind people.
"Some people have other
disabilities, some people are too young, some people are too old,
sometimes we're too intoxicated," said Brin.
Ideally, a car that
drives itself can minimize traffic by chaining together with other
self-driving vehicles and using highways more efficiently. Drivers
wouldn't be limited to listening to NPR and honking during their morning
commute; instead they could use that time to be productive, like the
millions of people who take public transit currently do.
Brin also discussed the
many parking lots in urban and suburban areas, calling them "a scar to
the surface of the Earth." Self-driving cars would be able to drop you
off at work and then pick up another person instead of idling in a
parking lot. If you did opt to own your own car, it could park itself in
the most efficient way possible.
Consumer Watchdog, a
consumer-rights group, has expressed reservations about the cars on
privacy grounds, saying they would allow Google to gather personal
information about passengers.
Google's fleet of
vehicles started with Toyota Prius Hybrids and later added the Lexus
RX450h, a crossover SUV, to test on different terrain. The project is
directed by Sebastian Thrun, who also co-founded Google Street View.
There are many legal and
technical problems still to be worked out before the cars are
commonplace. Asked who would get the ticket when a driverless car runs a
red light, Brin replied, "Self-driving cars do not run red lights."
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