Technology/Autonomous Vehicles

Google’s Driverless Prototype

by Frédérick Boucher-Gaulin
Photo: Google

Google has been working on a driverless vehicle for quite a while now. After fine-tuning its Street View program, the Californian tech giant is now looking into building a vehicle that could drive on the roads while eliminating the main cause of accidents in cars today: the driver!

A few prototypes are currently driving around Mountain View, California, but they are mostly Toyota Priuses and Lexus RX Hybrids retrofitted with driverless technologies. For the first time, Google has unveiled a car built specifically for this purpose.

Some of the main features of this egg-shaped pod are inside: there is no steering wheel, and no pedals! The car doesn’t need your driving inputs. Just enter a destination on the screen, and the vehicle gets moving, scanning the environment in 360 degrees and detecting hundreds of objects, from the car in front of you to the fire hydrant on the sidewalk.

This prototype is hand-made, and features a front fascia made of foam to make sure that in the event of a collision with a pedestrian, they would be unharmed. Google plans to build around a hundred cars for research purposes.

For now, the vehicle is limited to 40 km/h. It can’t yet drive on public roads, but a few people have had the chance to go for a ride in a parking lot, and they were pleasantly surprised.

Google doesn’t plan on building its own car lineup, but instead would like to partner with a major automaker to get this technology onto the streets.

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