“Safety has been paramount for the Google self-driving car team from the very beginning,” said Sebastian Thrun, the artificial intelligence researcher who created the Google project. PhotoSAN FRANCISCO — In Silicon Valley, where companies big and small are at work on self-driving cars, there have been a variety of approaches, and even some false starts. But Google decided to play down the vigilant-human approach after an experiment in 2013, when the company let some of its employees sit behind the wheel of the self-driving cars on their daily commutes. The most divergent paths may be the ones taken by Tesla, which is already selling cars that have some rudimentary self-driving functions, and Google, which is still very much in experimental mode. “We wanted it to be significantly safer to the point where there would be no accidents ever.”So far Google’s robotic cars have largely succeeded, with just one slow-speed fender bender caused by the robotic driver.

Source: New York Times July 04, 2016 20:37 UTC