Toward the Autonomous Car

Long a staple of science fiction, self-driving vehicles that act as robot chauffeurs have been a cultural dream for decades. For most of that time, however, the dream seemed a part of some unattainable future.

But now, led in large part by Google's sudden and unexpected charge, autonomous robot cars come tantalizingly close to reality. As various mapping, sensing and location-based technologies have converged recently, Google has begun to position itself as the leader of our robo-chauffeur future. Yet for all of the technology's promise, it still has some major—and perhaps insurmountable—hurdles to overcome.

Google estimates that one million lives could be saved around the globe by driverless cars each year. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in the U.S. alone there were 5.8 million crashes in 2008. Of those, about 34,000 resulted in fatalities, 1.6 million resulted in injuries and 4.2 million entailed some sort of property damage. The NHTSA says these numbers have come down over time—attesting at least partly to the ever-increasing safety of all vehicles—but they clearly still account for a large amount of deaths, injuries and property damage that driverless cars could drastically reduce.…

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