Audi reported last month that its driverless Autonomous TTS research car had completed the winding, 12.42-mile climb to Pike’s Peak in 27 minutes. That’s only about 10 minutes longer than it takes a human to drive the course, but I certainly didn’t see it reported on the front page of the newspaper.
About a month before that, however, Google let loose with a public relations effort about how its engineers had been riding around in modified Toyota Priuses that drove themselves. You would have thought the tech firm had landed a man on the moon with all the coverage it received. Indeed, anyone listening to CBS radio stations in October would have heard effusive news reports from the company’s CNET news service that made it sound like the upstart Silicon Valley firm had cracked a code that has eluded Detroit, Germany and Japan for decades.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Automakers—especially General Motors—have been researching autonomous vehicles for decades. In the ‘90s they were building demonstration units capable of driving better than most humans. Although you can’t go down to your local dealership and buy one, the technology developed along the way has trickled down into the cars on sale now, not to mention benefitting the military.
Driverless cars were being built long before Google was a verb. General Motors showcased autonomous cars as far back as the 1939 World’s Fair. At GM’s “Futurama” exhibit, the company predicted we could be zooming along the developing highway system at 100 mph by 1960. Even then, GM engineers knew that they could program the machines to be better drivers than humans.
Cars like the Ford Taurus already offer features like park-assist, lane departure warning, blind-spot detection, and adaptive cruise control. All of these technologies have grown out of research into autonomous cars, just as NASA’s space program in the 1960s brought us Velcro, satellite TV, medical imaging, ear thermometers, smoke detectors, and shock absorbing football and bicycle helmets.
The next generation of cars, like the Volvo XC60, will have technology like its standard auto-braking feature called “City Safety.” This stops the car when collision with an obstacle is imminent, leading British highway safety regulators to actually call the Volvo “the car we couldn’t crash.” While this technology can be expensive to add, the cost is coming down as more vehicles come with it. And insurance companies are starting to help out. European insurance companies, for example, offered a 30 percent discount on premiums for the XC60. Similar discounts are surfacing in the U.S.
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