THE “look Ma, no hands” moment came at about 60 miles an hour on Highway 101.
Brian Torcellini, Google’s driving program manager, had driven out of the parking lot at one of the company’s research buildings and along local streets to the freeway, a main artery through Silicon Valley. But shortly after clearing the on-ramp and accelerating to the pace of traffic, he pushed a yellow button on the modified console between the front seats. A loud electronic chime came from the car’s speakers, followed by a synthesized female voice.
“Autodriving,” it announced breathlessly.
Mr. Torcellini took his hands off the steering wheel, lifted his foot from the accelerator, and the Lexus hybrid drove itself, following the curves of the freeway, speeding up to get out of another car’s blind spot, moving over slightly to stay well clear of a truck in the next lane, slowing when a car cut in front.
“We adjusted our speed to give him a little room,” said Anthony Levandowski, one of the lead engineers for Google’s self-driving-car project, who was monitoring the system on a laptop from the passenger seat. “Just like a person would.”
Since the project was first widely publicized more than two years ago, Google has been seen as being at the forefront of efforts to free humans from situations when driving is drudgery. In all, the company’s driverless cars — earlier-generation Toyota Priuses and the newer Lexuses, recognizable by their spinning, roof-mounted laser range finders — have logged about 300,000 miles on all kinds of roads. (Mr. Torcellini unofficially leads the pack, with roughly 30,000 miles behind the wheel — but not turning it.)
But the company is far from alone in its quest for a car that will drive just like a person would, or actually better. Most major automobile manufacturers are working on self-driving systems in one form or another.
Google says it does not want to make cars, but instead work with suppliers and automakers to bring its technology to the marketplace. The company sees the project as an outgrowth of its core work in software and data management, and talks about reimagining people’s relationship with their automobiles.
Self-driving cars, Mr. Levandowski said, will give people “the ability to move through space without necessarily wasting your time.”
Driving cars, he added, “is the most important thing that computers are going to do in the next 10 years.”
For the automakers, on the other hand, self-driving is more about evolution than revolution — about building incrementally upon existing features like smart cruise control and parking assist to make cars that are safer and easier to drive, although the driver is still in control. Full autonomy may be the eventual goal, but the first aim is to make cars more desirable to customers.
“We have this technology,” said Marcial Hernandez, principal engineer at the Volkswagen Group’s Electronics Research Laboratory, up the road in Belmont, Calif. “How do we turn it into a product that can be advertised to a customer, that will have some benefit to a customer?”
With all the research efforts, there is a growing consensus among transportation experts that self-driving cars are coming, sooner than later, and that the potential benefits — in crashes, deaths and injuries avoided, and in roads used more efficiently, to name a few — are enormous. Already, Florida, Nevada and California have made self-driving cars legal for testing purposes, giving each car, in effect, its own driver’s license.
Richard Wallace, director for transportation systems analysis at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit group that recently released a report on self-driving cars with the consulting firm KPMG, said that probably by the end of the decade, “we would be able to have a safe, hands-free left-lane commute.” In 15 to 2
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