At the beginning of 2015 I got really excited about Google’s driverless cars and wrote about it here.
There is a big chunk of our society that is not massively comfortable with the idea of cars driving themselves. I am sure this is because we are taught through films and books that robots will always end up trying and kill the human race. Think…Terminator, Matrix, Marvel’s Ultron, War of the Worlds etc.
But we humans cannot help ourselves and we push the boundaries. Which brings me to my point – in February 2015 Google and a few other tech companies began road testing driverless cars, we all got excited and then moved on. I am awestruck with the progress the driverless car tech has made in 10 months.
This month (November) a driverless car – perfectly legally with all the red tape dealt with (this is an amazing feat in its own right!) – drove itself with NO human at the wheel from Vigo to Madrid. A whopping 600km (372 miles). Who undertook this feat? –Was it a tech giant – Google, Apple, Microsoft? No, it was a car manufacturer – Citroen.
Well, “Go Citroen”, I say. What visionaries, what nettle graspers. When it comes down to it Citroen have seen tech companies encroaching on their territory and they are making moves to keep the upper hand. So what are their long-term plans? Nothing half-hearted that’s for sure, they intend to equip production cars with self-driving systems from 2018. By 2020 totally autonomous driving will be possible in their vehicles. Blimey take that tech companies.
Maybe next year’s Christmas partygoers will be testing out being chauffeured home by their own cars. Now that is an idea I am totally comfortable with. Bring it on.