Emerging Technologies Blog

Image credit Dan Smith

Google in July released two of its 23 self-driving cars on public roads in Austin, Texas as part of test to learn how to navigate through some tricky driving situations in the city, road conditions and how people interact with its self-driven cars . The test would also allow the company address a lot of issues before making its driverless cars commercially available to the general public by 2020. Driving around Austin means other drivers like this bicyclist have had their own moments with Google self-driving cars. A cyclist that bears the name Gregg Tatum  shares his experience with a Google self-driving car in Austin recently.


Gregg Tatum

A Google self-driving Lexus has been in my neighborhood for the last couple of weeks doing some road testing.The white Lexus SUV was unusual as it was adorned with a prominent roof-top camera as well as a variety of other sensors attached to various parts of the car.

Near the end of my ride today, we both stopped at an intersection with 4-way stop signs. The car got to the stop line a fraction of a second before I did, so it had the ROW. I did a track-stand, in which a rider comes to a stop and then simply balances the bike without putting a foot down, and waited for it to continue on through.

 It apparently detected my presence through one of the sensors and stayed stationary for several seconds. it finally began to proceed, but as it did, I rolled forward an inch while still standing. the car immediately stopped...

 I continued to stand, it continued to stay stopped. then as it began to move again, I had to rock the bike to maintain balance. It stopped abruptly. We repeated this little dance for about 2 full minutes and the car never made it past the middle of the intersection. The two guys inside(the safety drivers) were laughing and punching stuff into a laptop, I guess they were trying to modify some code to 'teach' the car something about how to deal with the situation.

See How Google self-driving car detects cyclists

 The car finally rolled on and I proceeded on my ride … it was an interesting experience and I noticed I felt safer dealing with a self-driving car than a human-operated one.

Very Interesting indeed! It looks like the Google car was confused by the Cyclist track stand.

You will recall that in May one of our avid readers who lives in California and  shares the road with self-driving cars for the last two years, penned us his encounter with a Google self-driving car while in traffic. Among other things he revealed in the post, the reader told us that Google cars are overly cautions, polite and drives like grandma. He came to the conclusion  he would buy one  as he feels more safer around Google self-driving cars.

 are you guys aware of this?