Dave Taylor For the Camera
Dave Taylor For the Camera

Q: I read in the paper about Google offering driverless cars for sale and that makes me really anxious. Are they really safe? Can a computer really handle the vagaries and random behavior of other drivers on the road?

A: To quote "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," don't panic. Nothing's for sale yet. The Google self-driving car team is still testing things and exploring ideas. Certainly nothing's for sale as of yet.

Further, they've been working on this technology for almost five years now and have logged more than 200,000 miles of computer-led driving, so it's not quite someone hacking their vehicle to let a Windows XP laptop drive 75 mph through U.S. 36 rush hour traffic.

I've experienced self-driving technology in a small way myself: a Ford that I test drove a few weeks ago in California had the ability to parallel park without human intervention.

Really an interesting experience to take my hands off the steering wheel and let the car park itself. With built-in radar on all sides of the vehicle, however, it actually worked surprisingly well, doing a better job than most people I watch struggle to squeeze into a spot.

There's a long road between parking a car at 5 mph and zipping through heavy traffic at 50 mph, of course, and that's why there are thousands of hours of tests still to come before true automation becomes a reality.


Still, the radar systems in cars offer interesting safety capabilities, including the ability for the car to automatically brake when you're approaching the vehicle in front too quickly.

Who wouldn't want a car that helps them avoid accidents, especially as we become increasingly distracted with smart radios, smart phones and the thousand other distractions facing us today?

What I imagine you read about was the latest Google self-driving car demo, actually, a demonstration of a vehicle with no gas pedal and no steering wheel.

That's "Jetsons" technology, though, because there's no ability for a human to override the driving system if there's an accident, detour or other road hazard that's unexpected.

But the intention isn't for that to be how we zip into Denver for dinner, but rather for closed, controlled environments. And it's a concept vehicle, not something you can buy today.

Think about the transport system at Denver International Airport to understand where these could be terrific. Now you take the escalator down to the train, take the train to the correct concourse, then an escalator up and walk to your gate. What if instead there were small self-driving cars that you jumped into as soon as you were through the TSA screening, scanned your ticket, and it drove you directly to your gate?

Ah, that starts to sound pretty cool, doesn't it? That's much more in line with what we'll see as first use cases for self-contained driverless vehicles, and personally, I'm looking forward to it!

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world for long enough to be a statistical outlier. When he's not dealing with U.S. 36 traffic, he covers the tech industry at AskDaveTaylor.com.