Look Ma, No Hands!

Our future is most certainly filled with many exciting ideas and inventions. When we sit down and watch an episode of Doctor Who or Futurama we expect a certain level of automation to come from their vehicles. It seems like this distant destiny is upon us with the advent of driverless cars.

It appears that every company under the sun has to a lesser extend invested in this technology and has firms working on them. Google, and it’s leader of the driverless car project Sebastian Thurun, have been experimenting with the various features that would come as standard in the new type of vehicle.

Utilizing a Toyota Prius as a featured model, their car seems to be able to navigate through busy streets and motorways in San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Thurun, being a professor at the prestigious Stanford University, the project is aimed and improving driving capabilities by removing the main obstacle: the human. Already presenting his idea at the annual TED talk as well as successfully completed a 140,000 miles journey, the place of the new car almost seems certain.

A key feature in creating these cars is perfecting the GPS systems on board. Without a key sense of where the car is, the notion of a driverless car would not exist. While external sensors keep a great deal of the data in play, notifying the central computer of any anomalies, the GPS system provides the eyes to the driverless system.

Central to the existence of this car is the safety that it will provide. Negligence or mistake, car accidence are without a doubt one of the leader factors in deaths each year. In order to avoid such catastrophic mistakes, Thurun has had a personal stake in this project as a friend was badly injured when he was very young by a car. The motivation but also the great success that the new technology will bring could have the potential to provide for a better state of life.