By Cornelius Nunev


Larry Burns, former R&D chief of General Motors, is excited about self-driving vehicles. He believes that they will fill entire U.S. fleets by 2020. By 2015, however, consumers should get a good look at the technology in readily accessible versions.

Rethinking mobility

With driverless vehicles, people will be able to do whatever they want in the car. They could take a phone call, play a game or even do business on the trip into work. People do not have to put any time into thinking about driving the car. Distracted driving will not be a problem, and fewer crashes will come. Emissions will even decrease quite a bit, as people will have fewer, lighter automobiles in cities.

Focus on Google

Radar and video cameras are put to the driverless vehicles in order to detect road dangers or stop signs. They position the vehicle on the road very well. Google has gotten a ton of attention with its test drive of driverless vehicles. It has used Prius and Audi TT versions to test drive the system on public roads. In fact, Google has already test driven the program for thousands of miles.

Due to a separate human driver, there was one accident while the driverless system was active. Drivers can take over the system in the car at any point.

GM tried it once

In Victorville, California, there was a 55-mile race sponsored by the U.S. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in 2007. This race had GM's driverless Chevrolet Tahoe. The Tahoe was able to win the race, according to Automotive News, and used similar radars and cameras on the vehicle.

Trying the system out

On the self-driving vehicles, there will be adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance and lane-keeping technology. Although Burns thinks the self-driving car will not come out until 2020, he does believe that these benefits will be seen on most customer vehicles by 2015.

Determining liability

Insurance will be one of the biggest issues that have to be overcome for the self-driving cars to work. Security regulators and insurance companies will have a difficult time figuring out fault in the case of an accident if both vehicles were driverless vehicles.

See more about Google's car




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