Google Self-Driving Cars Draw Nearer to Driveways

Whether you like it or not, self-driving cars are coming. 

Google released a video of its latest progress toward autonomous vehicles as the company continues with perfecting the technology in city driving environments. “We still have lots of problems to solve,” Chris Urmson, director of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, wrote in the technology company’s official blog. “But thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously.”

SEE ALSO: Autonomous Vehicles Won’t Be Crash Free: Google Exec

Several automakers are focusing on self-driving cars. For example, Nissan promises to have an affordable autonomous vehicle by 2020.

“We’ve logged thousands of miles on the streets of our hometown of Mountain View, California. A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area,” Urmson wrote.

We’ve improved our software so it can detect hundreds of distinct objects simultaneously—pedestrians, buses, a stop sign held up by a crossing guard, or a cyclist making gestures that indicate a possible turn. A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can’t — and it never gets tired or distracted.”

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