Google's driverless car is "brilliant but boring"
Last week, Google invited journalists to take a (carefully choreographed and very brief) ride in two of their driverless vehicles, one of which was a modified Lexus, and the other was one of the little pods we have seen so much speculation about in the press this year. Journalists were not allowed to take any photographs of the experience, but they all seem to have come away with a similar feeling;﻿ that the technology was amazing, but the ride was slow and boring. To quote the BBC: “As much as I'd like to write here about the white-knuckle "Oh my gosh, there's no driver!" ride I had in a prototype car, that really was not the case. It was slow. It was cautious. It was safe, a more attentive driver than any human could possibly ever be.” However, surely that is the point?

For so futuristic a car, the interior of Google's self-driving car prototype is, well, cheap.

The seats look and feel like they were pulled from the battered and bruised 1998 Ford Escort I drove in college. So do the bulky black buttons for the windows, climate control, emergency stop, and "go." The car of tomorrow has teal accents and lots of flimsy grey plastic that looks cheap. Instead of a dashboard, steering wheel and pedals, there's an empty bin big enough for a carry-on suitcase.

It's a stark contrast to the sleek, sophisticated concept cars we've seen from Google's competitors. The Mercedes-Benz F 015 is a gleaming ingot packed with white leather, blonde wood, black carbon fiber, and more touchscreens than a big box store. Audi's autonomous A7 has a user interface that's as elegant as it is logical. The cab of Daimler's self-driving semi resembles a Swedish sauna.

And then there's Google, with a car that looks like a Roomba, and sounds like one, too. Yes, it's just a prototype, And no, Google doesn't plan to sell this thing to the public. But it's still the vehicle the company uses to show us its vision of the future of transportation, and in that sense, it's not the most appealing sales pitch. It doesn't even have a futuristic code name.





1 / 8 Chevron Chevron Google selfdriving-car-gallery2 Google's self-driving car prototype doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals.

The fact Google invited journalists to ride around a rooftop parking lot didn't make the car seem any cooler.

The ride was more carefully choreographed than a Taylor Swift concert. I pressed the the big black "Go" button, and the car rolled away with a whir. It made a few turns, and maxed out at around 15 mph. A Google employee stepped in front of me, and the car slowed and let him continue on his way unhindered. A car pulled up alongside me, and the Google Car slowed to ensure we didn't collide. Then a cyclist made a similar move, and the car responded in a similar fashion. I saw the car make the exact same trip 10 times in all.

Look past the econobox styling and appointments of the car and the boring drive around that parking look, though, and you can see just how far Google has come in its quest to make drivers irrelevant—and how far ahead of the competition it is.

Killing the Driver

Google has been developing this technology for six years, and is taking a distinctly different approach than everyone else. Conventional automakers are rolling out features piecemeal, over the course of many years, starting with active safety features like automatic braking and lane departure warnings.

Google doesn't give a hoot about anything less than a completely autonomous vehicle, one that reduces “driving” to little more than getting in, typing in a destination, and enjoying the ride. It wants a consumer-ready product ready in four years.

This is how good human drivers think. And the cars have the added advantage of better vision, quicker processing times, and the inability to get distracted, or tired, or drunk, or angry.

The Silicon Valley juggernaut is making rapid progress. Its fleet of modified Lexus SUVs and prototypes has racked up 1.2 million autonomous miles on public roads, and covers 10,000 more each week. Most of that has been done in Mountain View, and Google expanded its testing to Austin last summer.

It's unclear how this technology will reach consumers, but Google is more likely to sell its software than manufacture its own cars. At the very least, it won't sell this dinky prototype to the public.

Predicting the Future

As the Google car moves, its laser, camera, and radar systems constantly scan the environment around it, 360 degrees and up to 200 yards away.

"We look at the world around us, and we detect objects in the scene, we categorize them as different types," says Dmitri Dolgov, the project's chief engineer. The car knows the difference between people, cyclists, cars, trucks, ambulances, cones, and more. Based on those categories and its surroundings, it anticipates what they're likely to do.