geekosystem

Google's been testing self-driving cars for some time now. It is known. Most of this has been private tests, conducted on approved courses. Following in the footsteps of Nevada, however, California has now approved Google's autonomous cars for their roadways -- in a trial capacity, anyway. Google will still be required to have a human handler present to take over if needed, but all the heavy lifting will be accomplished by the car itself. Obviously, Skynet has already won.

Automated personal transport might not be quite as far away as one might think. Google's fleet of self-driving cars has now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing under computer control without a single accident. Though the company has not yet mentioned precisely how many of these miles were garnered on public roads, the total is still impressive. In addition to this, Google has announced that members of the team will begin driving the cars solo rather than in pairs.

If Google has its way, Nevada will be the first state in the U.S. to permit the self-driving cars that have long been a popular pet project of the company's to be used on public roads. The New York Times reports that the two measures that Google is pushing "are expected to come to a vote before the Legislature’s session ends in June ... One is an amendment to an electric-vehicle bill providing for the licensing and testing of autonomous vehicles, and the other is the exemption that would permit texting" within self-driving cars. (That latter measure alone is likely to win Google a few points from dangerously text message-mad drivers.) Google has also revealed for the first time in the course of its lobbying push that it has test-driven its robotic vehicles over 140,000 miles of California driving, with only the occasional human intervention.