Safety and the Self-Driving Car
Released on 01/15/2014
I believe the self-driving car
has very strong environmental implications: safety, social.
It'll really fundamentally transform how many of us live.
Congestion is a major problem
for pretty much every city in the world.
We're just not operating cars very efficiently.
When you think about cars,
they have transformed cities, everything else.
They cause traffic jams.
There's a lot of congestion.
A peak capacity highway,
a highway that's really functioning, has only 6% cars on it
and 94% is the space between the cars
that we need because we're humans.
We're not that great driver.
Imagine a future where your highways actually work.
You go on a highway with your car
and left of you is a group
of very close distance cars coming by.
You push a button, it opens up and you merge in,
and then you push a second button
and all of a sudden the car drives itself,
all the cars line up very closely to you.
You're now in a train.
The train uses the aerodynamics of a train
but it frees your time.
Now imagine we fill the highway with cars
and pack 50% of the surface, which means all of a sudden
we have almost no congestions any more.
We would be able to do away with almost all traffic jams.
I started to realize we can actually build cars
that are safe, and cars that can drive themselves.
Cars are as safe as their drivers are.
We text while driving, we do all kinds of things
that distract us from the driving tasks.
Almost all accidents in the United States
are caused by lack of attention or driver errors.
Now, with self-driving technology, I think it's kind of
the holy grail for that specific problem.
Which is, we will be able to give people the mobility
that they want without exposing themselves and others
to the dangers that come with the fact
that they're not quite able to operate motor vehicles.
The biggest challenge we face is to make it really safe.
We recently had a situation where a plastic bag
blew across a highway and the car thought it was a kid
flying across the highway.
It sounds funny
and it was certainly something you could fix very quickly,
but these types of situations,
humans are just really brilliant
and cars have a hard time, to be honest.
So I believe there's an entire universe of amazing ideas
to be developed and I wish I lived 200 years later
to see them come to fruition.
But now is the time to start working on it.
Starring: Sebastian Thrun
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