No Need For Loud Pipes, Driverless Cars Save Lives…?
From Forbes, edited by Canyon Carver California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed a law making it legal for driverless cars to travel on public roadways. It’s not that smart minds in Detroit, Japan and Germany aren’t already working on autonomous cars. They’ve been doing so for years. But as with most new technologies, automotive engineers want to make absolutely certain that they’re safe and perform as expected before launching into mass production. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration agrees, of course, which is why it recently launched the first real-world test of vehicle-to-vehicle communication near Ann Arbor, Mich. But Google, which has already developed a fleet of driverless cars that some of its employees use to commute to work, was eager to press ahead. It lobbied heavily for the California law, which would allow testing of autonomous vehicles on the state’s roadways as long as there’s a fully licensed human in the driver’s seat to take over if needed. “Today, we’re looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow’s reality,” Gov. Brown said during a news conference at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. “This self-driving car is another step forward in this long march of California pioneering the future and leading not just the country, but the whole world.” California, of course, has led the way toward cleaner vehicles, often adopting stricter laws than the federal government to control greenhouse gases and combat global warming. Other states, primarily in the Northeast, have followed suit. In 2008, California sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for trying to block its enactment of tough new rules on tailpipe emissions. Most automakers sided with the EPA, saying it would be impractical for each state to dictate its own emissions standards. Critics accused the carmakers of dragging their feet on fuel economy. All sides eventually […]
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