The evidence that self-driving cars can result in safer roads continues to mount, but some drivers can’t help but feel a little anxious about handing over control to a computer. With your hands on the wheel you can squeeze through a traffic light just a little late, break the speed limit, and park in questionable spots when you feel the situation requires it.
The car? Well it would have to follow all the rules to a T, right? Well, on at least one of those counts, maybe not. Google’s self-driving cars are programmed to break the speed limit sometimes.Google began testing driverless cars in 2010 and has since covered more than 300,000 miles with only computer guidance. In that time, there have been no accidents caused by the computer system, though the human drivers have gotten in a few fender benders. Google’s driverless cars use a combination of GPS and Lidar to follow the road and identify other cars and objects in the road.
The problem with a self-driving car is that someone has to program them, but can they really include code that tells the car to break the law? The roads are full of people who exceed the speed limit, and it actually turns out to be much safer to keep up with traffic than to poke along at the posted speed limit all the time. So Google made the decision to allow its cars to go as much as 10 mph faster than the posted limit if it needs to keep up with traffic.
That raises the question, who pays the speeding ticket if your self-driving car gets pulled over because it decided to go 75 in a 65 zone? Maybe you can just send it over to the Googleplex? This might not be a concern forever. When the majority of cars have self-driving systems in place, they can communicate with each other to move more efficiently at lower speeds without all the stop and go driving. That’s still a long way off, though.
Google just announced in May that it will start making driverless vehicles soon, but they won’t be designed for highway speeds just yet.