--- title: Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving | TIME description: Predictions about a future in which cars that will drive themselves have been staples of everything from science fiction to pop culture to corporate PR for decades. But now it looks like driverless cars, at least, may finally be hitting the road. canonical: https://time.com/video/uDXtGW1i/ og:title: Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving og:description: Predictions about a future in which cars that will drive themselves have been staples of everything from science fiction to pop culture to corporate PR for decades. But now it looks like driverless cars, at least, may finally be hitting the road. og:url: https://time.com/video/uDXtGW1i/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/uDXtGW1i/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving twitter:description: Predictions about a future in which cars that will drive themselves have been staples of everything from science fiction to pop culture to corporate PR for decades. But now it looks like driverless cars, at least, may finally be hitting the road. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/uDXtGW1i/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving [Watch (HLS stream): Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/uDXtGW1i.m3u8) (4:57)  _Published 2014-05-06. Predictions about a future in which cars that will drive themselves have been staples of everything from science fiction to pop culture to corporate PR for decades. But now it looks like driverless cars, at least, may finally be hitting the road._ --- Jul 27, 2023 4:36 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [U.K. Starts Road-Testing Driverless Cars](/video/GyKY36GV/) ### U.K. Starts Road-Testing Driverless Cars [California To Google: Put Steering Wheels, Pedals On Your Driverless Cars](/video/y0kwIjsi/) ### California To Google: Put Steering Wheels, Pedals On Your Driverless Cars [Google Unveils Driverless Car Complete With … No Steering Wheel](/video/Zg2Yk4Ca/) ### Google Unveils Driverless Car Complete With … No Steering Wheel --- ## Transcript On Star will now disengage automatic drive. Are you ready? Yes. Imagine being the perfect driver. You never got drowsy. You never took your eyes off the road. You could see 360 degrees around you, and you never got drunk. That's the promise of driverless car technology. And it's closer than you think. [ MUSIC ]. We weren't always that close. We've been talking about driverless cars since the 1930s. And back then, everyone thought we'd definitely be in driverless cars by the 1960s. Safe distance between cars is maintained by automatic radio control. In the world of tomorrow. Well done Firebird two, you're now under automatic control, hands off steering. [ MUSIC ]. How we missed that window by a good 40 or 50 years, but today we're closer than we've ever been before. Here we go guys. [ MUSIC ]. The fuse was really lit by Darpa in 2004, with the Darpa Grand Car Challenge, it was a contest to find technology, that the military could use for driverless vehicles. It was a race through the desert, at top speeds, with out crashing, and guess what? In 2004, there were no wins. Okay we have [ INAUDIBLE ] on its side. [ MUSIC ]. It wasn't until 2005, that Darpa Grand Car Challenge again, through the desert, as quickly as possible, without crashing. There was a first- place winner. I saw the concept first in the Darpa Grand Challenges. So we decided at Stanford to build a different selfdriving car, and the unimaginable happened. It became the first car. To ever return from a Darpa Grand Challenge challenge. So Google had lured away that guy Sebastian you just saw, to work on Google's driverless car technology. We've driven in cities, mountain roads, day and night, and even Lombard Street in San Francisco. We've driven 140, 000 miles. People didn't even notice. [ MUSIC ] As for how Google's driverless car works, it's a mixture of laser sensors, radar, cameras and GPS. The real secret sauce though, is the laser sensor on top of the car, which captures a 360 degree image, and millions of data points every second. The reason the laser is so important, is the GPS isn't quite reliable enough. GPS can't detect objects in front of you, it can't draw a map around you, as you drive like the laser can. You think Google maps is impressive, wait till you see the maps that are produced by a bunch of Google driverless cars, going around the city. There's also a camera mounted underneath the rear view mirror, that leverages image recognition programs, to help the car read signs, traffic lights, and other elements in the driving environment. Also to help detect objects are four radars, three mounted on the front of the car, and one on the back. Our sensors spot the orange signs and cones early, to alert the car of the lane blockage ahead, and we can change lanes safely. There's also an ultrasonic sensor called a position [ INAUDIBLE ] that works along with the GPS to help this car's mapping position. So all this imagery is being captured, all this data is being collected, and that's great, but it means nothing without sophisticated software to make sense of it all. That's where you're gonna start to see differentiation amongst people like Google, and Ford, and Audi, and all the different car companies. All the hardware is relatively similar for each of these solutions. The software is what's gonna make the difference. The thing about driverless cars, is that they need to be adaptive. What happens if it snows? What happens if it starts raining? What happens if someone darts out in front of the car? These cars need to be able to adjust themselves on the fly. So now what you'll see is our vehicle at a busy intersection. The red and green fences indicate that the car will stop and wait until a path is clear. We even detect the cyclist approaching from behind, and wait until they pass. Whether you know it or not, there's already plenty of driverless car technology all around you. You have cars that can parallel park themselves, cars that'll help you stay in your lane, cars that'll warn you if you're about to hit something, cars that'll actually break for you if you're about to hit something, and then cars that can actually valet park themselves. Take a company like Valeo that's working on cars that park themselves, picture this, you pull up to Costco, you get out of your car, you go right into the store, and the car goes and finds a parking spot in the parking lot. That's the eventual promise. The technology is still on its early stages, but that's coming in the not too distant future. [ MUSIC ] So what's the future of driverless car technology? Will we ever have fully driverless cars? The answer is, yes. It's gonna happen. Just embrace it. You're not gonna have to embrace it for a while, though. People wanna drive cars. People don't trust. Driverless cars yet. An unmanned car driven by a search engine company, we've seen that movie. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy. There's a lot of legal issue we've gotta get through. The first time there's an accident with one of these driverless cars, it's gonna cause a whole mess. There's gonna be a media firestorm. Politicians are gonna get involved. Right now, it is against the law for a vehicle to be on the roadway without a human being driving it. People are gonna be saying, what's to be done about these driverless cars? That's why we're easing into it right now, it may not happen overnight, may not happen in a decade, may not happen in 25 years. But we're off to a good start, we, just need to get comfortable with it. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Driverless Cars: The Future of Driving","description":"Predictions about a future in which cars that will drive themselves have been staples of everything from science fiction to pop culture to corporate PR for decades. 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