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Google announced their self driving car project in 2010. Their vision was to make this car more enjoyable and more efficient along with safe driving. Though there’s a lot left to design and test the car, but they have already completed over 200,000 miles of computer led driving journey safely. Recently, Google employees choose Steve Mahan to join with them for a special drive on a carefully programmed route to have a technical experiment of the autonomous car. Steve Mahan is nearly blind and sat behind the driving wheel of the car.

To prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time and reduce carbon emissions, Google desired to make a new car but a different one. This car would be a self driving car. So, Google developed the technology for cars that can drive themselves. Their automated cars use video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to see other traffic with detailed maps to navigate the road ahead. Google’s data centers help a lot processing the enormous amounts of information and transferred it to the car. In fact, Google arranged (in other word ‘Hired’) the best engineers, technical team, software engineers around the world to make this autonomous car perfectly.

Steve Mahan is not blind, but nearly blind. He has already lost 95% of his vision. He is blurred in the eyes. When he sat in the car, a gentle robotic voice announced ‘auto driving’ and the car started moving. ‘Safety’ was and still now is Google’s first priority in this project. So, when Steve was on the driving seat, there was a trained software operator in the passenger seat to monitor the software. Check out the video.

Steve Mahan enjoyed the journey and was satisfied with the technology. In his word, the technology just seems awesome. Google believes, people will cordially accept this autonomous car as anyone even blind people would be able to drive the car.

Source : The VERGE

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