Taking a Spin in a Self-Driving Car

• March 30th 2012

by Shilpi Paul

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We’ve been hearing rumblings about self-driving cars for awhile. Google has been riding them around California and Nevada, computer scientists are visualizing intersections full of them, and lots of people are singing their praises. Now, we get to see one in action.

Somehow, watching a video of one man in a self-driving car makes a world full of them seem much more feasible. Check out this video of a blind man taking one of Google’s self-driving cars out on the town. He runs errands, picks up food and seems totally comfortable sitting in the driver’s seat with nothing to do. “Where this would change my life is to give me the independence and flexibility to go the places I want to go and need to go,” he says.

Some people estimate that self-driving cars will be widely available within the decade. Cars have been automating for a few decades now, and in many ways this is just the next logical jump up from a path that began with automatic transmission and now includes crash prevention, parallel parking assistance, and pedestrian detection systems.

Wired has an extensive report on driverless cars here. From the sound of it, road rage and fender benders may soon be a distant memory.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/self-driving_cars_really_happening/5354.