If you’re late to work and find Google’s new self-driving car in your path, take a deep breath before you flick your middle finger.
Many people will love spotting the cherubic two-seaters when they begin roving through Mountain View neighborhoods this summer. They portend a bright future full of helpful robots.
But the most impatient drivers caught behind these vehicles might find them a little smug.
They’ll be unfazed by your honks, of course, because these cars know the rules of the road and the intimate geography of Mountain View better than you do. They linger cautiously before crossing intersections, slow down near elementary schools, are deferential to bicyclists and baby strollers and never go faster than 25 miles per hour.
“We designed it to be a very defensive driver,” said Jaime Waydo, who helped guide a space rover, Curiosity, across the surface of Mars before she joined the Google team.
I boarded one of these bubble cars Wednesday on a rooftop parking lot overlooking Caltrain’s San Antonio station and the wooded hills that give this city its name.
Miles away from the bustling Googleplex, the quiet office is the brand-new home to an elite wing of the Google X research division – a place under the sway of Google co-founder and director of special projects, Sergey Brin.
It’s also home base for the 25 prototype cars that Google is about to unleash on Silicon Valley as an experiment to see how they interact with real people. (Google won’t call these cars anything but the “prototype,” for fear of getting stuck with the wrong brand name too soon.)
Because of DMV rules that guide the testing of autonomous cars, those that hit local streets this summer will have safety drivers ready to take control when needed.
But the one I stepped in had no steering wheel, no accelerator pedal and no brakes, reflecting the fully autonomous vision of Google engineers. My co-passenger pushed a button and off we went.
Lasers atop the car provide high-resolution data “about the world around us,” Waydo said. Radars on the side measure the speed and acceleration of surrounding objects. Cameras help read color-coded traffic lights and detect cones marking a new lane.
And the software guiding the cars is already equipped with richly detailed 3-D maps of all of Mountain View’s streets.
“Our cars are not capable of autonomy in a part of the world we’ve not mapped,” said software engineer Dmitri Dolgov, who’s been working on the technology for nearly a decade.
What they are still trying to perfect is how to predict human behavior in its most unexpected forms.
As our car ferried us across a mostly empty garage, Google subjected it to an obstacle course that resembled a tame Disneyland ride, staffed with real Googlers instead of puppets.
I wondered about these fake pedestrians and how much they were paid for this work, but there was no time to chat. (Google has more than 100 state-approved test drivers, according to the DMV.)
One held up a stop sign, and the car halted. Another walked suddenly across the road, and the car paused to let him go. Another rode a bicycle and stretched out her hand before turning. The car recognized the signal and reacted accordingly.
What the car wasn’t prepared for, however, was the mingling crowd of onlookers that included journalists, Mountain View residents, urban planners, disability advocates and, for a short time, Brin observing the scene in gym shorts and Crocs. None of them did anything that signaled to a human eye that they were going to jump in front of the car, but the car’s screen showed the crowd as a blob of flashing lights. The car braked, inched forward, then halted again, calculating the probability that one of those people might get in the way.
Explaining the jittery behavior later, Google spokeswoman Katelin Jabbari wrote that “an empty roof, as you can imagine, doesn’t have a clear set of road rules for the car to follow,” so the onlookers appeared “much more unpredictable than if we were all standing on a sidewalk.”
“The prototype was being super cautious when it was driving near us, which is the safe/conservative thing to do,” she wrote.
Above: Google’s new self-driving car drove on Wednesday into a company garage in Mountain View. (Photo by Matt O’Brien)
