Gadgetory

hello and welcome to inside scoop I'm samhita joining me as seth rosenblatt senior writer for cnet set thanks for being with us thank you sue me okay so I got a little bit of setup here so imagine never having to worry about whether or not you're going over the speed limit or having to look for a parking space that is part of the promise of self-driving cars and today Google which has been working on a self-driving car project for a number of years now gave a handful of lucky people the opportunity to ride in one of these autonomous vehicles Seth was one of those lucky people I was actually one of those lucky people as well what were your thoughts it was you know it was a unremarkably remarkable right you know like we were talking about earlier the most amazing thing to me was this moment where the car is driving along there's a bicyclist in the bicycle lane just ahead of the car and the car sort of nudges over just a little bit in its own lane anticipating that the bicyclist might need some extra room incredible I mean human drivers don't do that yeah the car that I was in did the same thing except a bus was taking up the entire lane next to us and so they refer to it as nudging they also do something the cars also do something really cool called blind spotting which is they actively make sure that they don't linger and stay in other cars blind spots we check our own blind spots mhm were you not used to as drivers thinking about whether or not we're in somebody else's blind spot it's a it's a very unusual thing and having the self-driving car be safer than the human driver I think appeals to a lot of people one of the there are some limitations that way and one of them as you may have noticed this as we are pulling out of the parking lot here the autonomous driving feature is not engaged it's engaged outside of the parking lot because the car can't quite handle parking lots yet not quite yet and and one of the interesting limitations about the car is that Google is redoing their entire mapping system so google maps which you know and love for navigation is not being used in these vehicles they're creating an entirely new maps because these maps in them man-made objects such as traffic lights and stop signs and it's not just that there's a traffic light speed limits isn't it's not just that there's a traffic light in the map it actually can tell you how high the traffic light is above the ground because as the car approaches it it needs to know where to continuously look for the red or yellow or green circle um tell us what it looks like inside because we do see that obviously there's the lidar and the sugar and the radar sure um and you see that that's spinning movement that tells you it's scanning the environment I'm at a very high rate but inside the car you see a couple of different things so you mentioned the computer right so the co-driver has a laptop sitting on his or her lap and it has a a special lidar generated map of the area and so you can see vehicles and pedestrians and and basically everything that's not you shows up as a red box or rectangle you show up as a green box and it's really sort of interesting seeing the world passed by in real time in this wire frame scenario there's also a built into the car is the kill switch which allows the driver or the co-driver to disable the autonomous driving instantaneously and I'm sure in your ride you must have experienced this every once in a while the car would kind of make an announcement crosswalk or I know that you only know that actually only happened once or twice except for the manual engage right you know it was again it was so unremarkable it was the most perfect short little drive that I've ever taken it was just a ride yeah but we shouldn't get too excited about this because who's gonna be a while we don't know when it's gonna show up and has google mention anything about whether or not you know this is gonna make it to market at a definitive time in the future they have a timeline they want to see it in the row on the road somewhere or by 2017 so it's only another three years for us when you think about the fact that they've been doing this for five years that's really amazing so this has been you know by the time we gets the 2017 it'll have been an eight year project they've only just now just recently started doing city road testing which a year ago they weren't doing your up until a year ago had been really freeway only testing so this is something that's taking them a really long time to perfect well when you're asking people to trust a car with your life and your family's lives I I can understand why they want to perfect it right I'm not complaining yeah Seth thanks so much thank you soon for inside scoop I'm Sumi das thanks for watching