Google’s self-driving car an overview

Google’s self-driving cars, now logged 700,000 miles of awesome accident-free autonomous driving on the roads of California. 

To demonstrate this, Google has released a new video that shows some impressive software improvements that have been made over the last two years. self-driving cars can now track hundreds of objects simultaneously, including pedestrians, an indicating cyclist, a stop sign held by a crossing guard, or traffic cones. 

While Google’s driverless car makes it look easy, there is a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes.

Not only is there around $150,000 of equipment in each car performing real-time LIDAR and 360-degree computer vision (a complex and computing-intensive task), but the software itself is the result of years of development.

Basically, every single driving situation that can possibly occur must be painstakingly programmed into the software. It isn’t like Google has built an artificial intelligence that can learn how to drive a car from basic principles — if Google doesn’t tell the car what to do, it doesn’t do anything.


In the mean time, the adoption of technologies like adaptive cruise control (ACC) and lane keep assist (LKA) will bring lots of almost-self-driving cars to the road over the next few years.

cost of Google's self driving car is around   4,200,000.