Gadgetory

notes up Kasim could be HD here still in Las Vegas and I've seen a lot of self-driving tech so far here at CES like if you walk through any of the halls with cars in them there's tons of like open room concepts and things like that but they feel kind of useless you know like as long as they're still in a concept phase they don't really feel really yet the idea is we're building the interiors of these cars now for this autonomous future where you don't have to be sitting at the wheel so you can turn around face your friends you kind of feel like you're in a moving room lots of glass it's very different and I've seen a lot of that all over the show floor really far out stuff crazy shapes huge chunks of glass and stuff built for autonomy actually BMW I think had a sort of a happy medium they showed me what they called the eye next which is sort of a really futuristic vision of a next-gen car but not too far in the future so it has these wide open spaces and touch sensitive fabrics and surfaces for gestures but it still sort of seems like a normal car but still without the actual self-driving tech in action it's just kind of half the story so then I got an email from a company called Yandex you may know them as a Russian tech company and they said hey come check out our autonomous car at CES I'm kind of thinking okay well I've I've seen a lot of autonomous concepts and things like that how could this be much different but then they said listen we have a fully autonomous driverless car hitting the streets of Las Vegas with all the other regular cars right now you can go for a ride you in so I am super in let's do it so the car itself is a retrofitted Prius on top is radar lidar and camera array for the car to map out its surroundings I think that's Owen who's used the auto pilot from a Tesla it helps me to not be as nervous in the backseat but it's still crazy not having anyone in the driver's seat at all as the car navigates the streets there's a safety engineer in the passenger seat which had a kill switch next to him for if anything happened to go wrong or it needed to be interrupted but we did about a 15-minute loop around real streets real drivers real people and everything went smoothly and it was kind of still trippy the whole time this this really feels like the future I got to say it might not be this crazy soft driving interior that everyone else is talking about but this tech part is cool to me the details are that this is a small area in Las Vegas that was already mapped by this company so it was a predetermined route and the car knew where it was gonna go but everything else road conditions the other cars the pedestrians the traffic lights that turns speed changes all of that was decisions made by the car but all that makes sense for a taxi I mean you map the town or city you want to be in you have predetermined routes for pick-up and drop-off and then the taxis are driverless and they just go from there and the even cooler nerdier part is these iPad pros you're seeing that's a visualization of what the sensors on top of the car are seeing in real time so the radar lidar and cameras are all combining to identify what is other cars on the road what's pedestrians what is a stationary object and seeing things up to 250 meters away in every direction so things six seven cars away we're on the iPad that I couldn't even see in real life out the windows so there are some red paths and when we start driving you're gonna see some green paths and basically what I'm seeing here is it's evaluating what's currently happening on the road and what's about to happen red paths green paths good and it takes the green path and has a predetermined destination we're on a left turning lane so you can see way up ahead where it wants to go and it's just gonna follow where I can based on the cars around us you can't really merge right now so those paths are red it has a green path and it has a bunch of other possible paths to take if it wants to switch it up but right now it's all green and the best part is the reaction from other people on the road was pretty great there's people pulling out their phones to record the driverless car people kind of stare a little bit at stoplights when they realize what's going on and apparently Las Vegas cops think it's pretty funny too but overall the 15 minutes we've spent in this car were a lot of fun I learned a lot just looking at these iPads and what they were seeing as the car drove around and this gave me a sort of an optimism for the future of self-driving tech so that's pretty much it figured I would share my experience would you let yourself get driven in a driverless taxi like this maybe share this video with other people you think would be interested and I'll leave some links below with some more information so you can look it up if you want to see that too either way thanks for watching see you guys next one peace