Google Inc. is putting in a great effort to develop self driving cars. Their leader came to Detroit, the motor city, to announce that the search giant is looking for partners to make the project of self driving cars successful by the next decade.
The head of Google's project, Anthony Levandowski at the Society of Automotive Engineers conference, said, “We are talking to every car company to gauge the level of excitement the project brings to them.”
He also quoted that the internet search giant is yet to go a long way in terms of testing the project before it markets it for sale in the international market. However, he believes that the project will be ready long before the next decade and if not, it will be a real shame for the engineers.
Regarding the marketing and pricing of a self-driving car system, Google has not taken decision yet. Of course the whole project is dependent on the software and that's where the main challenge lies. However, one cannot ignore the hardware issues like the cost and reliability of hardware like sensors to detect and warn the driver of the obstacles around.
Anthony Levandowski also said that other options are to form partnerships with automotive giants, providing systems as aftermarket installations or giving the project away for no price so as to increase the usage of other Google services. Anthony Levandowski informed that he is not suggesting that alone.
Already the Automotive giants and their technical alliances are working on automating some percentage of regular driving of their own. So it’s quite uncertain how much excitement can Google stir with its new project.
Google is however, devoting ample resources both in terms of finance and manpower to the impending challenge. They already have roped in some of the car-makers, who use Google services like Google maps navigation.
When asked about the liability if the self driving system fails, Mr. Levandowski expressed that the only issue that Google still needs to resolve is, how to make sure that the driver gets the notification of system failure well ahead of time. However, he did inform that the company is going to stand behind the project and it will not be shelved.
