‘Golf cart in a silly hat’ could halve road toll
Los Angeles – Google says its new custom-built car could save more than half a million road deaths a year, but shouldn’t it have a steering wheel, some might ask? Apparently not. The company has been working on self-driving cars for several years, installing specialised equipment in modified conventional vehicles. These have given the person sitting in the driving seat the option of grabbing the wheel or slamming the brakes on should something go wrong.
That is becoming old hat. Its latest diminutive electric-powered runabout won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal . . . ‘‘because they don’t need them’’, Google says. ‘‘Our software and sensors do all the work.’’
The top speed is capped at 40kmh and the prototype car can be summoned through a smartphone app. Its sensors can detect objects more than 200 metres away. Detailed maps help it to navigate the road ahead.
Inside it has two seats with seat belts, a space for passengers’ belongings, buttons to start and stop, and a screen that shows the route – and that’s about it. Google plans to build 100 of them.
Its looks have already been derided – one pundit called it ‘‘a golf cart wearing a silly hat’’ – but if all goes according to plan, it could herald the biggest revolution in mass transport since the invention of the horseless carriage.
Cold calculation lies behind the design: the car is meant to appear unthreatening, to avoid spooking the public as technology stands poised to transform another facet of daily life.
Sebastian Thrun, the artificial intelligence guru who first led the Google car project, believes robotic cars could cut global road deaths – the biggest killer of young adults – by half, which would mean saving 600,000 lives a year.
He was inspired by the death of a childhood friend in a car crash.
However, the technology is also likely to be used on the battlefield: he began by developing an autonomous vehicle for a competition run by the US military.