[From the class of 09]

It's still in the testing stage but it looks like it is coming along.

Amazing! Google's self-driving car allows the blind to drive

This is some of the best driving I've ever done," Steve Mahan said the other day.

Mahan was behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius tooling the small California town of Morgan Hill in late January, a routine trip to pick up the dry cleaning and drop by the Taco Bell drive-in for a snack.

He also happens to be 95 percent blind.

Mahan, head of the Santa Clara Valley Blind Center, “drove” along a specially programmed route thanks to Google’s autonomous driving technology.

Look, ma! No hands. And no feet!” Mahan jokes at one point in a video of the event, posted online Wednesday by Google. “I love it,” he added.
Google announced the self-driving car project in 2010. It relies upon laser range finders, radar sensors, and video cameras to navigate the road ahead, in order to make driving safer, more enjoyable and more efficient -- and clearly more accessible. The search engine giant was awarded a patent on the system in December.

In a Wednesday afternoon post on Google+, the company noted that it has hundreds of thousands of miles of testing under the belt, letting the company feel confident enough in the system to put Mahan behind the wheel.

“There’s much left to design and test, but we’ve now safely completed more than 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, gathering great experiences and an overwhelming number of enthusiastic supporters,” Google wrote.

“The concept of it is pretty awesome,” Eric Bridges, government affairs director for the American Council of the Blind, told FoxNews.com.

“There are a lot of hoops that are going to need to be jumped through in the years to come: Things like driver’s licenses and regulatory stuff to allow these vehicles to traverse roadways. But the technology is absolutely intriguing,” he said...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/03/ ... -to-drive/

[ALUmnus]

Any headline that begins with "Amazing!" I tend to ignore.

[From the class of 09]

Any headline that begins with "Amazing!" I tend to ignore.

Yeah a car that can drive itself is pretty lame

[ALUmnus]

It is lame! Have you ever seen Demolition Man?

[LUconn]

I was really tired driving back from Williamsburg on Sunday and I thought to myself, "I wish this thing could drive itself home and I could just take a nap". But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I would never trust it enough to sleep. I would always have my hands ready to grab the wheel.

[Hold My Own]

I think some are confusing the GDrive with Google's self driving cars. GDrive is the dropbox Google is working on

[From the class of 09]

I think some are confusing the GDrive with Google's self driving cars. GDrive is the dropbox Google is working on

Yeah I just posted about the Google car here instead of opening another thread.