by AUVSI News 

Just how driverless technology will appear on roads worldwide was up for debate on the second day of the Automated Vehicles Symposium 2015, which saw speakers debate if the technology was going to have to overcome the infrastructure or vice versa. 

Google’s Chris Urmson, Wednesday’s keynote speaker, made it clear that his company’s approach would involve leaving the human out of the loop as much as possible. 

In recent user tests, the company saw would-be drivers ignoring the road, preferring to do things like searching the backseat for cell phone charger. He said the company wondered if they should force the human to engage with the car or just let the car takeover driving entirely.

“Long story short, we picked the last one, because that’s the one that was truest to our mission,” he said. 

In light of this, Google has made its own prototypes, which are coming off the assembly line right now, says Urmson. Now the company is logging 10,000 miles a week in tests around its headquarters in Mountain View, California. Real-world driving scenarios are more inane than anything Urmson says he could come up with himself — including a recent scenario where a woman on an electric wheelchair was chasing a duck back and forth across the street with a broomstick. 

“I’m just gonna chill out here, let all this play out,” Urmson said, personifying the car. 

Urmson addressed the 14 accidents involving the cars that have been in the news recently — none of which were the fault of the self-driving car. None of the accidents required police intervention, and only one has resulted in any injuries. A man drove 17 mph into the rear of the Google car without applying the brakes. Urmson said he even slightly accelerated into the accident. 

“There’s only really one explanation for this. … This is somebody who is looking down at their cell phone,” he said.

Ultimately Google is driven by wanting increased safety and mobility for everyone on the road, and Urmson urged the crowd to continue their momentum after the conference closes. 

“We’re at an incredibly exciting time, and I think the growth of this conference is evidence of that,” he said. “I would encourage us to really think about how we can move this as quickly as possible.”

However, Urmson’s vision of car-centric technology was not shared by Dr. Adriano Alessandrini, project coordinator of Europe’s CityMobil2 autonomous bus system. He said that while Google wants to be able to drive everywhere and handle unknown situations, his project would prefer to have a robust infrastructure where they can operate safety at low speeds and sometimes even in autonomous-only zones. 

“We don’t care about that. … We want to have certified routes eventually and even adapted infrastrutures,” he said. He called a future full of personally operated driverless vehicles a “Wild West.” He also called on communities to be more forward thinking, saying in the future they be the main purchasers of driverless technology instead of individuals. 

“We do need communities,” Alessandrini said. “We cannot simply go to the client and say buy this vehicle.”

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