The car stops at designated stop signs. It glided around curves. It does not lurch or jolt. The most remarkable thing about the drive was that it was utterly unremarkable.
The engineers on hand weren’t high-powered “car guys” but soft-spoken software engineers. And there wasn’t any speeding even though, ironically, Google’s engineers have determined that speeding actually is safer than going the speed limit in some circumstances.
“Thousands and thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year,” said Dmitri Dolgov, the project’s boyish Russian-born lead software engineer, who now is a US citizen, describing his sense of mission. “This could change that.”
Dolgov, who’s 36 years old, confesses that he drives a Subaru instead of a high-horsepower beast. Not once during an hour-long conversation did he utter the words “performance,” “horsepower,” or “zero-to-60,” which are mantras at every other new-car test drive. Instead Dolgov repeatedly invoked “autonomy,” the techie term for cars capable of driving themselves.
Dolgov, who recently “drove” one of his autonomous creations the 450 miles (725 km) or so from Silicon Valley to Tahoe and back for a short holiday, simply says his mission is to perfect the technology. As yet Google has no plans of marketing such ‘autonomous’ vehicles.
