Google Robocars traveled 300 thousand miles with no accidents

Undoubtedly, cars play a significant role in our lives. We drive cars to get to the place we want fast enough. The history of car industry counts over a century of quite even development. Yet, however, driving cars has turned out to be not so easy. There are many reasons why drivers may sometimes be careless and get into accidents. This, in turn, results in phobias some people have against driving. Such people have to seek ways to avoid driving: they use public transportation, they ask their family or friends to drive them to the places they want to, they sometimes even have to spend extra money to hire drivers. Car accidents sometimes even provoke some people to having phobias against the very presence in a car. How can these problems be resolved? Numerous sci-fi writers forecast cars driven by robots or computers instead of people. Of course, such concept could reduce the number of car accidents and make driving and travelling by cars safer, because robots can’t gets drunk or otherwise emotionally unstable. But how close is this idea to our objective reality?

Some time ago Google announced that it begins to test its robocars - robotized vehicles controlled by onboard computers. It is quite obvious that such innovation represents a real breakthrough in car industry, making it much more convenient to use cars and allow people to avoid the bureaucracy and other complications bound with getting a driver’s license.

Recently, Google has announced the results of the testings of robocars. All the robocars tested have in common traveled 300 000 miles (or 482 800 km) without running into ANY accidents. It is necessary to note that the cars were tested under most various conditions (different traffic, weather conditions, time of day, etc.) This achievement is a real success, and evokes expectations most enthusiastic.

However, there is still much left to be done before robocars can be introduced to mass customer. It is still necessary to test how good robocars are under a number of specific circumstances: to improve the road recognition when it snows, to recognize the temporary road signs, as well as work through a number of more individual, yet common road situations.

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