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| Image credit Alison Alter |
Well contrary to that report, a member of the Google PR team tells Wearobo that there will always be drivers in their prototype vehicles during testing in Austin, Texas. In fact the vehicles have removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal that allow test drivers to override any mistake made by the cars. Here's an excerpt from the email.
''On Saturday, Mayor of Austin Steve Adler announced that we’ll be bringing a few of our fully self-driving vehicle prototypes to Austin for testing; they’ll arrive later this week, and we hope to start testing in the coming weeks. (For now, while we’re testing the prototypes, our test drivers will be aboard, and the vehicles are equipped with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal that allow our test drivers to take over if needed.)
Our vehicles have been self-driving in Austin for the last couple of months, and it’s been going well. As it turns out, human drivers and self-driving cars adapt pretty well to each other. There are a few small differences between Austin and Mountain View in terms of the actual road landscape -- for example, Austin has horizontal traffic lights, but Mountain View has vertical ones. For the most part, though, we can focus on learning how neighbors feel about having our Lexus and prototype vehicles in their neighborhoods. It’s particularly useful for us to arrive in a city where self-driving vehicles are completely new to people; in Mountain View, people have been seeing us around for years, so their reactions could be different than someone who’s seeing us for the first time.''
So guys our apologies for the misinformation!