Google is still working at its famous self driving car and it seems that the vehicle could have been involved in 13 accidents.
Actually, the self driving car appears to be of high interest at the moment. While Apple is believed to be working at a vehicle, although nothing has been revealed with regards to what this car will feature, Google’s self driving car is getting better.
Although the autonomous car that Google developed has evolved since it has been first revealed until now, the vehicle is still in tests. Furthermore, it still requires in certain situations to hand over control to humans.
Google has just released its latest report on the evolution of its self driving car and the famous company revealed that in the last 14 months there have been 272 situations when the vehicle detected an issue and needed to pass control to the human test driver.
So, in case the driver wouldn’t have taken over, the car would have been involved in 13 accidents. Google has named these 13 “contacts” and the famous company did not provide any detail on what this would have meant. However, because of the human driver, the accidents did not occur. Google also reported improvements, saying that the number of disengagements has dramatically declined over the mentioned period.
However, the newly released report indicated that despite the mentioned improvements, the Google car is not able to drive completely autonomous. A driver always has to be ready to take control over the vehicle if the situation requires his intervention.
However, Google seems to be determined to work to ensure that the number of such situations will decrease until the human driver will no longer be needed. This is what John Krafcik stated, saying that Google’s purpose is to make vehicles that need no human backup.
Until Google will be able to provide that, many other companies have shown interest in the world of self driving cars. When Google will be able to place its vehicle on the market for sales remains unknown, but numerous analysts have claimed that a few years will pass until this will happen.
Other auto makers who are currently testing the self driving auto market are Bosh and Delphi Automotive Systems. They are doing much worse than Google, as their reports indicated much higher frequency of situations when the driver’s intervention was required.
Delphi also revealed some of the situations in which such intervention was needed, including poor roadway lane markings, bright sunlight blinding cameras, as well as other’s drivers’ erratic behavior.
Although many believe that Google’s car is the car of the future, there are also numerous safety advocates who think that Google should not be allowed to release this vehicle and take it to public roads.
Google got a hit last month when California released proposed regulations with regard to autonomous cars, which would require specially licensed drivers. This would surely put Google’s vehicle in not such a great situation and Google’s efforts of proving that the car does not need human control could turn out to be in vain.
