Free Republic

"I am not surprised that autonomous vehicles were hit," Smith said. "Any vehicle out on the road long enough will be in a crash." Google said its automated cars have driven nearly 1 million miles on autopilot and are now averaging around 10,000 self-driven miles a week mostly on city streets. The cars have traveled another 700,000 miles with humans at the helm. "Over the 6 years since we started the project, we've been involved in 11 minor accidents during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was...

Google is working on a technology that, if perfected, would prevent about 35,000 deaths per year in the United States and 1.2 million deaths per year worldwide. To put that number in context: About 23,000 American men and women will die of leukemia in 2012, according to the National Cancer Institute. But while the technology Google is working on isn't the cure for cancer, it's pretty impressive. What is it? Self-driving cars. According to the U.S. census, 33,808 people died in car crashes in the U.S. in 2009 — 37,423 in 2008. According to the World Health Organization, 1.2 million...