Self-driving cars to hit the streets

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (TNS): AFTER A year of testing its bubble-shaped driverless cars on the empty roads of a shuttered military base, Google is about to deploy its fleet on the busy streets of Silicon Valley.

For now, the cars must have safety drivers ready to grab the wheel or hit the brakes if something goes wrong. But self-driving software could soon move from test cars to consumer vehicles as the California Department of Motor (DMV) Vehicles puts finishing touches this month on new operational rules for autonomous cars, making it the first government in the world to create a detailed handbook for robots on the road.

OUR GOAL

“Our goal is to create something safer than human drivers,” said Google cofounder Sergey Brin, speaking this week as his company’s two-seater prototype zoomed around a rooftop parking lot in Mountain View. “And keep improving from there.”

Citing his engineering team’s major advancements in the past six months in understanding a bicyclist’s hand signals and other realworld scenarios, Brin stood by his prediction that the technology is “still roughly on track” for consumers boarding fully autonomous cars by 2017. But a scholar advising the DMV on its new rules believes a car that can safely navigate by itself through crowded San Francisco streets is still “many decades” away.

BALANCING THE RULES

The competing predictions, and varying degrees of robot control, leave regulators with the challenge of balancing the rules that are needed now – as the technology still has unforeseen hiccups – with a future when fully autonomous vehicles become more common.

“This is our very first time we’ve had to do something like this, and not many states are in our situation,” said Bernard Soriano, the DMV deputy director in charge of drafting the new rules. “There are a lot of eyes on what we’re doing.”

DRAFT RULES

The draft rules – due several months ago – will be released soon, Soriano said, and will be followed by a public hearing this summer. Nevada, Michigan and Florida also have established rules, but mostly for testing and none as detailed as what California is preparing.

Seven companies have had permission since September to test-drive autonomous vehicles in the state. Even before those rules were in place, Google had spent years test-driving Lexus SUVs outfitted with selfdriving software.

To make its vehicles safe, Google has made them conservative. That means, for instance, that they are programmed to wait for a second and a half before moving through a green light.

GOOGLE’S AUTONOMOUS CAR CRASH RECORD

Google admitted this week that its self-driving cars have been involved in 11 minor accidents on public streets in recent years, all of them the fault of humans. Chris Urmson, head of the company’s self-driving car project, said Wednesday he was “incredibly proud” of that record, given the number of miles driven. While refusing to release the full accident reports, he revealed some details about the crashes: Seven were rear-ended by a human-driven car. Two were side-swiped on the highway. One was hit in an intersection by a car rolling through a stop sign. One got into a fender-bender when a Google engineer was driving the car to Best Buy.