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Mountain View, California \u2014<\/i>\u00a0Driving in the autonomous Google electric car is a very different experience than its predecessor, the Lexus RX350 Hybrid equipped with Google self-driving equipment that I tested here over a year ago.<\/p>\n
For one thing, there\u2019s what to call it.<\/p>\n
Google has yet name it so the public has been filling the void. It\u2019s been variously referred to as a \u201cmarshmallow,\u201d \u201cnerf car,\u201d and \u201ckoala ball.\u201d My favorite? The \u201cSkynet Marshmallow Bumper Bot\u201d (courtesy of The Oatmeal.com).<\/p>\n
But the other difference is the car doesn\u2019t feel like a car at all. It feels more like a Disneyland ride. The interior is devoid of traditional car tools. No pedals. No instrument panel. No steering wheel. The absence of the latter is transforming, actually. Rather than making me feel less safe, it is comforting not to see the pilot-less steering wheel spinning around like car is possessed. My wife won\u2019t get in a self-parking, steering wheel-spinning Ford Focus, much less a possessed, self-driving Google Lexus.<\/p>\n
I felt like I was in a Disney monorail, or the front of a New York subway rail-car. But without the rails.<\/p>\n
Government regulations still demand that autonomous vehicles have a safety engineer sitting by in the driver\u2019s seat if they are let loose on public roads. Which is why I was driving in the Google Lexus on public roads last year \u2014 and on the parking-lot roof of Google\u2019s X-lab in the Marshmallow Bumper Bot. But Google did everything to make the roof seems like a public road.<\/p>\n
They threw pedestrians across our path. Bicyclists. A merging Ford Fusion. Not to mention the fixed rooms, light poles, and walls that make the X-lab roof look like a maze. The Google car navigated them all \u2014 braking, stopping, steering. By my second ride, I was comfortably glancing at my phone and checking email.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s another big difference with the Lexus. The Marshmallow Bot is Made in Detroit.<\/p>\n
Google has partnered with Roush which manufactured my tester in Livonia. There the car is hand-built with the same roof-mounted \u201cLIDAR\u201d dome (a package of lasers, radars, and cameras), sensors, and software as the Google Lexus \u2014 but packaged about the size and shape of a VW Beetle. Then it\u2019s shipped to Mountain View for final software updating by Google engineers.<\/p>\n
The engineers say the Google car looks so cute because it was designed from the ground up with round corners so the LIDAR can see 360 degrees around the car. \u201cWe wanted to re-imagine the car without the steering wheel,\u201d says Lead Systems Engineer Jaime Waydo. \u201cWhen we do that we want to build a car that can see 360 degrees.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Google also admits its cuteness has the effect of helping the self-driving car gain public acceptance. It\u2019s reassuring that the autonomous car heading down the street looks like a friendly kid\u2019s play toy and not Darth Vader (like, ahem, the new Lexus RX\u2019s grille). Significantly, the LIDAR dome \u2014 which looks like a spinning bubble gum machine with legs on top of the Google Lexus \u2014 has been greatly modified to resemble the blue dome on Andy Griffith\u2019s Mayberry police car. Indeed, from a distance, the Google car can look like a VW meter maid.<\/p>\n
This attention to detail means Google car is serious about coming to the market. Soon.<\/p>\n
While Google founder Sergey Brin won\u2019t put a date to the Google car\u2019s ambitions, he says Google is working closely with regulators. The Marshmallow Bot is also a regular fixture on public roads \u2014 approved for testing by the government of Mountain View and Austin, Texas.<\/p>\n
Google is testing the cars furiously, having already logged 1.2 million miles. Safety is a first priority, and the Google car has been limited to 25 mph on local streets. The few accidents it has been involved in have been almost entirely caused by human drivers running into it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were surprised by the frequency of times we\u2019ve been rear-ended,\u201d says Brin. It\u2019s much higher than we first thought. Human drivers are not paying attention. It speaks to the challenge of people driving with cell phones and other distractions. And that\u2019s the safety issue that a self-driving car solves.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brin says the Google car will make driving safer, but will never replace the fun of driving. \u201cThere is a future for both worlds,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019ll always be the pleasure of the open road.\u201d But for the daily drudgery of metro commuting \u2014 Brin says the average work commute is 50 minutes \u2014 the Google car\u2019s technology will be a revolution.<\/p>\n
Driving in the Google car, its immediate future is evident: It will be a boon to taxi services like Uber and commercial fleets like airport shuttles. My tester was roomy with heated seats, a tasteful stitched vinyl interior, and luggage room where the dashboard and console used to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cDriverless vehicles will change the game,\u201d says Rattan Joea, CEO of California-based, airport-focused Prime Time Shuttle, who sees a future of Uber-like ride shares. \u201cIt will streamline our service by taking the operator out of the equation. It will save on insurance by removing human limitations. Computers don\u2019t get tired. They don\u2019t get sleepy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Such commercial services might initially be able to afford the huge up-front costs of the Google technology given its long-term labor savings. But ultimately, Goggle\u2019s Brin sees the rolling marshmallow \u2014 or whatever its name will be \u2014 as affordable transportation so that the elderly (like his Parkinson\u2019s afflicted mom) can get around even after they are no longer fit to drive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mountain View, California \u2014\u00a0Driving in the autonomous Google electric car is a very different experience than its predecessor, the Lexus RX350 Hybrid equipped with Google self-driving equipment that I tested here over a year ago. For one thing, there\u2019s what to call it. Google has yet name it so the public has been filling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17266"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17267,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17266\/revisions\/17267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}