Austin streets to get more crowded with self-driving cars

Chris Urmson, director of the Google Self-Driving auto Project, said he is grateful to Austin for the opportunity.

And in the test, the researchers used a track stand to simulate a cyclist balancing on their pedals but moving just a little bit-the way it might happen in traffic-because it is a confusing thing for the computer in the autonomous vehicle to decipher.

As the Washington Post explains, the cyclist was executing a track stand, inching slightly forward without putting a foot on the ground. Now taking another giant step in transforming the way the world moves, Google has confirmed that they’re going to begin testing fully autonomous vehicles in Austin, Texas.

Track stands are a common practice for serious cyclists.

The comical dance continued for another two minutes, during which the auto never left the intersection. The track stand is nothing to a human driver but the Google vehicle is still learning from this one.

Austin Mayor Steve Adler welcomed Google’s initiative to test the newer models in the city as well, at a press conference on Saturday at Thinkery, a children’s science museum.

A stock photo, but all too real.

From the Google website: “We’ve self-driven over 1 million miles and are now out on the streets of Mountain View, California, and Austin, Texas”. Reportedly, the assessment showed that a switch over to self-driving cars could reduce road accidents by 80 percent.

A biker has revealed to Roadbikereview.com when he was standing at an intersection with his bike a Google vehicle got confused. “It stopped abruptly”. After we’d stopped, an auto slammed into the back of us at 17 mph - and it hadn’t braked at all.

Though the self-driving cars have been tested on California roads, Austin will become the first city outside of the state. “The auto immediately stopped…”

Cellphones, of course, are a particularly big problem for safe driving.

The tidbit highlighted above is also a glimpse into how the testing program uses actual humans to “teach” the auto to understand the countless unexpected things it might discover on the road.

Google will send three prototype self-driving cars to Austin next week, after representatives from the company tested six of its older models in the city for the past two months.

Put simply, if a tech company introduced the human as a product engineered to drive cars, it’d go out of business.

Following the Austin encounter, Google gave a surprising response.

The company still has a long way to go before these robot cars will be driving the majority of Americans around, but they have made great strides in recent years. The resident described how the cars wait a few seconds after a pedestrian has completely cleared a crosswalk before beginning to turn through it.