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Google Cars don’t need a driver

Google is road-testing cars that steer, stop and start without a human driver!

The cars have travelled a total of 225,300km on major California roads without much human intervention, according to a posting on Saturday on Google's corporate blog.

The goal is to "help prevent traffic accidents, free up people's time and reduce carbon emissions," project leader Sebastian Thrun wrote in the blog post.

 

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It's not the first signal that Google wants to change how people get from place to place. In a speech on September 29 before the Techcrunch "Disrupt" conference, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said "your car should drive itself. It just makes sense".

"It's a bug that cars were invented before computers," Schmidt said.

Thrun said the cars were never unmanned - a back-up driver was always behind the wheel to monitor the software.

Google said the technology was being developed by scientists who were involved in an earlier set of unmanned car races organised by the government's Defence Advance Research Projects Agency.

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