Driverless Cars - liability, technology, and a test drive

Continuing its very successful practice of giving test drives to journalists and politicians, Google recently took Randal O'Toole of Cato for a ride.  Some highlights:

He said the car and hardware cost about $100,000, but Google has just a handful of them. When they go into mass production, he estimated an ordinary car could be retrofitted for a couple of thousand dollars. Some cars already have many of the sensors the Google car uses, so the cost of retrofitting such cars would be much lower.

This is fantastic to hear, and something I hadnt given much thought to. If they can retrofit cars rather than having to build them from scratch, that could dramatically accelerate adoption of the driverless technology.

As we threaded through downtown DC traffic, he noted that the car relies on GPS for only the most general purposes. Mainly it relies on the information it senses and its built-in knowledge of the area. For example, Google programs the location and height of every traffic signal the car might encounter so it knows where to look for the signals.

This is also good news, as use of GPS has been a big concern for a variety of reasons.  The article does mention that the cars currently have information only about local areas - the car can drive around DC but not from DC to CA - but software updates should be able to make up for that in time.

And finally, this is encouraging in the short term, as Google leads the push for driverless cars, but does little to settle concerns that liability laws will remain a significant hurdle to widespread adoption:

Automakers probably won’t bring self-driving cars to market under current laws, he speculated–but those laws won’t stop Google. He promised that Google would stand by its software: If a self-driving car is involved in an accident, the car will have a record of what other vehicles involved were doing up to the accident. If the other vehicle is at fault, the record will prove it, and if Google’s car is at fault, Google would pay the cost and fix the problem so it won’t happen again.

Google is awesome.