Why The Idea of a Google Driverless Car is Nonsense

The title should be, Don't forget Volvo, Nissan, BMW and others are working on driverless cars too. The future will be awesome.

Why is anyone getting worked up over this.

I'll tell you why it's being done by Google. A computer driving a car is an artificial intelligence problem. Google is fundamentally an artificial intelligence company.

Car companies are not artificial intelligence companies. They're not even software companies - just look at antiquated the average stereo/navigation system is in even the latest, most expensive cars.

I'd definitely rather have Google do it and license it back to the car companies than have the car companies do it on their own.

The software is going to be solved in the next 5-10 years. The hard part after that is dropping the sensor price enough to make this work (a lot of the SICK lasers are $35k+ still). But 10-15 years from now, we are going to have self driving cars for sale, no question in my mind.

Driverless car projects have been around for 30 years. Anyone following European R&D in this area can easily cast their minds back to the DRIVE project

That's awesome. Where were they in DARPA's 2 Grand Challenges and the Urban Challenge [1]? We can also cast our minds to ALV [2] and NAVLAB [3], which were state-of-the-art in 80s and 90s respectively, so what? They demonstrated that a computer can control the car in a strict sense -- keeping it on the road and maybe stopping for obstacles, but driving is a bit more complicated than that. The real challenge is in navigating from point A to point B which observing rules of the road and interacting with other traffic participants safely -- something that was not demonstrated until 2007. Google's autonomous car program grew directly out of CMU's and Stanford's Urban Challenge projects.

Volvo pulled off the more impressive feat of platooning the three cars behind a lorry for 200 kilometres on a busy Spanish motorway.

It's not a more impressive feat by anyone's standard. Following the leader is a much simpler problem than navigating traffic independently.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2007)#Ov...

[2]: http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/21...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navlab#History

Because of the liability involved in the American legal environment.

I've long suspected that Europe, Japan, or Korea will beat the US to commercially viable driverless cars.

Premise: "Car companies have been toying with driverless cars for years, so the idea that Google will produce driverless cars end-to-end is without merit"

What I can't understand is who thinks Google is going to be building these cars. Has anyone claimed that, even the referenced Forbes article? I don't think so. As others suspect, Google wants to offer the brains to these car companies, and tie them into the world of other Google services (Android phones, browser integration, ad injection, media streaming, etc).

Look at it another way: Microsoft supplies much of the tech to Ford, Hyundai, and others for their in-car "infotainment" systems, that doesn't mean when they started the CAR.NET initiative in the '90s they were trying to take on Ford and GM.