You can vote him off your dancing shows, America, but you can’t kill his dream. Oh, how they laughed when he said a car could drive itself. “What an amusing jest, David Hasselhoff. The dreams of a child. How diverting!” Well, who’s laughing now, you philistines?
Well, okay, it’s kind of tough to tell what’s going on there. That car is being driven not by a human operator, but a software program designed by Google:
Google today revealed a secret project to develop driverless cars, saying its test vehicles had driven 140,000 miles using software, sensors and a human minder…
Google’s project involved engineers from the DARPA Challenges races for autonomous vehicles. The route driven by the vehicles was first scouted for traffic conditions and road signs. The automated cars use laser rangefinders and terrain maps from Google’s server to travel the course; a driver and software engineer montior the parade.
Google said its cars, mainly Toyota Priuses that resemble Google Street View vehicles, have driven the Pacific Coast Highway and around Lake Tahoe; Google also says it alerted local police officers about its experiments before they hit the road.
This is a really good idea, and there’s no way it can ever go wrong and kill anybody. Why? Because SHUT UP, that’s why.
(Courtesy of Jalopnik, via Instapundit)