TEDxSalford

Self-Driving Cars Are Almost Here

For someone without a driver’s license, I’ve spent a surprising amount of my life thinking about cars. As a committed nerd that loves all things technological, but with a passion for environmental sustainability, there’s always been a conflict in my mind about whether I’m a fan or not. I’ve still not tackled this problem yet, but I’ve seen a few visions of the future which give me some hope. Self-driving cars are one of them. 

Amongst the vast portfolio of projects that the omnipotent Google has been working on in its labs, self-driving cars are one of the most fascinating. These have been in development for quite some time, and although they’re a long way from public adoption, the technology has been developed to the point where we’re now seeing working prototypes. They combine data from Google’s Street View system, cameras, radars and proximity sensors to navigate the vehicle, allowing a driver to take control whenever they want – like cruise control, but far more useful. Google has already clocked up thousands of miles using their prototypes, and their only accident reported so far turned out to actually be caused by human error.

I’ve mentioned it before here, but the things that excite me the most in terms of technology are those that we use in examples of imaginary sci-fi utopias – and this is definitely one of them. Handing over control of our roads to a company that is only getting more powerful could be seen as a risky move in any country, but I can see the positives of this one. The United States has a sadly unwavering statistic of 35,000 deaths per year caused by drunk driving. If these drunk drivers could instead be driven home by their own super-intelligent cars, then I’m all for it. Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt expanded on this this week at the Sun Valley Conference, insisting that “self-driving cars should become the predominant mode of transportation in our lifetime.”

Chris Gerdes is the director of the Center For Automotive Research at Stanford University (CARS), and gave a talk at TEDxStanford this May entitled The Future Race Car. In this, he outlines their amazing research into race cars that drive themselves. The critical difference here is that they haven’t been studying road-ready consumer cars. They’ve been pushing their self-driving cars to the absolute limit of their performance.

“Before people turn over control to an autonomous car, that autonomous car should be at least as good as the very best human drivers.” – Chris Gerdes

Expanding on this, Gerdes explains that researching the most efficient use of a car’s resources during movement is also a critical way to reinforce its ability to avoid accidents. He has  Although it might be quite a while before the general public cross the psychological barrier of handing over the wheel to a computer, I look forward to the time when it finally happens. Hopefully it might mean I can avoid getting that licence which I’ve been putting off since I was 17.

Finally, something else that caught my eye recently, that has nothing to do with self-driving cars, but is very much worth sharing. Although it goes against everything my environmental conscience stands for, I couldn’t help but immensely enjoy this short film about a man and his car that went viral this week.  appeared on Monday, and as of now has racked up 17 million views, and deservedly so. In it, Block hurtles through the empty streets of San Francisco in his souped-up rally car, drifting down motorway ramps, spinning doughnuts over tram tracks, and flying through the air over the city’s famous hills. It’d be fascinating to see Chris Gerdes’ brainwave analysis applied to this driver over this epic adventure. It’s not quite in line with the ideals of TED but it’s certainly an unconventional use of an automobile…