Thaindian News

California, Oct 10 (THAINDIAN NEWS) Google has revealed today that it has been testing its self-steering vehicle on the streets of California.

The company announced that the vehicle has already logged some 140,000 miles around California.

However road safety experts have started questions about the robot-driven cars. Transport authorities are said to be investigating the legalities of driving robot-driven cars in the state after Google made the announcement on Sunday. However Google maintains that their lawyers have looked into the issue of legalities and they are confident that driving robot-driven cars on the streets of California is perfectly legal.

“The technology is ahead of the law in many areas. If you look at the vehicle code, there are dozens of laws pertaining to the driver of a vehicle, and they all presume to have a human being operating the vehicle,” according to Bernard Lu, senior staff counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

Research suggests that robot driven vehicles can potential reduce the amount of lives lost on roads in the United States to half. Every year, some 1.2 million people die on the roads in America.

The Toyota Prius cars are fully automated and they have a driver in the seat to take control of the vehicle if anything goes wrong. The car also has a software engineer onboard to help out if any part of the car’s artificial intelligence goes wrong.