It’s a marvel of technology and arguably a complete waste of gasoline! Google’s fleet of driverless cars has completed 300,000 miles of driving without having an accident of any kind. It’s not clear how many of those miles were logged on Google’s secret race track, leading to the question, “GOOGLE HAS A SECRET RACE TRACK?!” Google announced the milestone yesterday and included the news that some Google employees will begin to use the cars for daily commuting and the freaking out of other motorists.
“One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars,” said Chris Urmson, Google’s engineering lead for this project, in a blog post today, “For now, our team members will remain in the driver’s seats and will take back control if needed.” There have, of course been some accidents that involved Google’s self-driving cars in the past. All of these, however, happened while humans were in control of the cars.
This whole thing is happening fast, right? Like we went from this idea of a driverless car straight into commuting in a pretty short amount of time. Kind of reminds me of how we went from the Wright Brothers to commercial airliners in a relatively short amount of time.
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