Google: From search engine to Car engine-Car that drives itself

Google surprised the automotive world with the recent announcement that the company has produced its own fleet of driverless Toyota Priuses. The company says that its cars have driven themselves for 140,000 miles—with a driver in the seat, just in case—making Google's fleet the most thoroughly tested autonomous cars to date. Considering that the first DARPA competition in 2004 ended without any of the competitors finishing the 150-mile course, the technology is moving fast.

Partially autonomous cars are closer than you think; in fact, they're already here. The 2011 Infiniti M56 uses forward-looking radar to track the car ahead and cameras to detect lane boundaries. It automatically maintains the gap to the car in front—with the brakes and throttle—and can also use a single wheel brake to nudge a drifting car back into the lane's center.

"We are building the blocks for autonomous vehicles," Nady Boules, the director of GM's Electrical and Control Integration lab and a member of the team that won the 2007 DARPA competition with a driverless Chevy Tahoe, recently told PM, "In ten years we'll have the technology for autonomous vehicles well in hand."

Digital maps and onboard computing power are already up to the task, but the accuracy and robustness of the sensors needed to determine the car's position and the obstacles around it require further development. Current commercial-grade GPS is only accurate to a couple of yards and it needs to be down to the inch level. The laser and radar sensors and vision systems require higher resolution and must get smaller in size before they're suitable for production cars.

Until those inevitable improvements arrive, our cars will gradually take control. Automated steering is on the horizon—electrically assisted steering already compensates for road crown and crosswinds—which will enable computer-controlled highway lane changes and accident avoidance. The challenge for the automakers that offer these systems will be keeping the driver engaged. "Until the car is fully autonomous, the driver is ultimately responsible," Boules says, "Part of the research is figuring out how to keep the driver from taking a nap."

Vehicular autopilot will be useful even without vehicle-to-vehicle technology, which broadcasts a car's speed, position and braking to increase safety. V2V is only useful if every car on the road has it, and that will simply take too long. Once V2V is ubiquitous, however, autonomous cars will be able to shed some of the sensors, reducing the cost.

The safety benefits of the automotive autopilot are obvious, but the autonomous car can also increase transportation efficiency and reduce congestion. And maybe one day we'll be surfing the Web as our car takes us to work.

Read more: Car That Drives Itself - Google Autonomous Car - Popular Mechanics