Would you trust your car to drive itself? Google is asking the populations of two states in the US to take that chance. The robot taxi, common in science fiction since the 1950s, is now set to become a reality.
The fully autonomous Google car has passed the legal hurdles for use on the roads of Nevada and California after hundreds of thousands of hours’ testing through cities and traffic. Now RobotCar UK is set to follow suit. The team at Oxford University led by Prof Paul Newman has equipped a Nissan LEAF electric car with lasers and cameras and stuffed a computer in the boot. First they drive it manually to construct a sensor map of the road and its surroundings. Next time it can travel that route in driverless mode.
Some fear that autonomous cars will take away their liberty and individuality. The ad for the 2011 Dodge Charger car plays on this. It depicts a near future in which robots are doing everything for us. The main character asserts his masculinity by ripping the head off a robot driver while the voiceover says, “robots can take our clothes, our food and our homes but they will never take our cars”. He then drives off aggressively at high speed.
Proponents like Prof Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University argue that robot cars will dramatically reduce the number of deaths on the road by using their sensors to detect other cars and pedestrians quicker and more reliably than a human driver and manoeuvre to avoid them. A robot car will not get distracted by the attractive woman across the road or the screaming child in the back seat and it won’t get sleepy.
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