These days, it seem that you can’t open a newspaper (if anyone still does that), or read the news without hearing about Google’s latest invention. Now the internet giant is venturing into the car business and trying to improve road safety. The new ground breaking technology being: the driverless automobile.
A prototype of Google’s new self-driving car—a two-passenger electric vehicle with buttons to turn the car on and off, but without a steering wheel, accelerator pedal or brake pedal—was unveiled in May. Without a driver at the wheel, the automobile is instead guided by a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) rotating sensor on the vehicle’s roof that scans the car’s surroundings to determine its driving route, as well as to identify such everyday obstacles as pedestrians, bicyclists and other cars. Although they don’t expect any of these automated vehicles on the road until 2030, this will vastly improve the amount of collisions on the road.