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In the past few days, there have been a lot of talks around Google’s new prototype of its self driving car. It seems the dream of starting to enjoy our lives, without wasting our time driving, is closer than ever and Google has almost achieved what they started dreaming ten years ago. The car was built by the Google X division, which opted for a new and more secure model rather than working on its previous modified cars.
The cards on the table have now changed because Google is not working anymore to modify an existing car, but they have built a car just for doing what is supposed to do, self-driving. This means the level of security is higher, the use cases are much larger and the company can start testing it heavily, with the aim to ship it before the next decade.
What has impressed me the most is the design. Google hasn’t opted for a professional look or a car with style, similar to what Uber does; instead they have chosen a design that makes the car look like a toy. When we first saw it we thought it was from Toy Story or Cars, and not a car that everybody is going to use in the next years.
However if you think about it, this design makes more sense to Google than any other. This car will be firstly shipped to people who have disabilities, families and so on. A design that makes the car look more an assistant or a friend will more likely help the transition between a world where we were used to pay attention while being in a car and a world where we can simply read a newspaper while driving.
The other massive update that everybody was surprised to hear was the absence of the “wheel”, which is something not that impressive at all, even though was covered by every single news source. If you are building a self-driving car, where people can sit and enjoy the ride without even thinking about driving, why would you include a self-driving wheel? That’s why it was basically irrelevant to add a wheel to a car that is there to serve you.
Although Google is looking at distributing this car to everyone, there is also another not well known detail that will completely destroy the taxi industry. Google is a primary investor in Uber, the private cars company that has a $10 billion valuation, which means that in the next ten years we are going to see self-driving private cars. It’s going to be a massive step from a world where people had to pay taxi drivers by cash to a world where we just have to press a button to call a car.
At the moment, the max speed the car can reach is 40km/h, which is not that much, if we look at where we can use it. However the company is not looking at distributing the car for long distance movements, the future is about staying in our houses and move from time to time. Transportation will be minimal and that’s why 40km/h are perfect, because the max speed limit in cities is around 50km/h, which is the speed of a moped.
If we think about cities such as New York, London and Rome, where there is a lot of traffic and people stuck in their cars for hours, there is no need to have a self-driving car that can reach 100km/h. This is just the beginning, the next models will be faster and probably more suitable to everyone, from a design point of view.
