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GM Betting On Driverless Cars
Industrial behemoth General Motors declared that driverless cars may be ready for sale within a decade. GM Chief Excecutive Rick Wagoner will devote part of his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show to driverless vehicles.
Regular readers of Technovelgy know that there is a lot of state of the art research that backs up the possibility, done by firms around the world. Read about Self-Steering Buses In Cambridge, the Honda Accord ADAS Heinlein Wannabe, DARPA's Urban Challenge For Autonomous Vehicles and Carnegie Mellon's Boss Wins DARPA Urban Challenge for a taste of what's available now.
(Boss from Carnegie Mellon wins 2007 Urban Challenge)
"Now the question is what does society want to do with it?" Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said. "You're looking at these issues of congestion, safety, energy and emissions. Technically there should be no reason why we can't transfer to a totally different world.""This is not science fiction."
Actually, of course, it is. Fans remember the 1941 Camden Speedster, an early example from the imagination of Robert Heinlein.
When GM rolls out its first autonomous car, I'll check this one off my list.
From GM researching driverless cars.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 1/9/2008)
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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