Google self-driving car project makes progress, according to The Detroit News.
Google Inc. said Monday it has made major progress in its self-driving car project, as the search engine giant has focused its efforts on making its autonomous test cars operate safely in urban environments.
The Mountain View, Calif., company said in a blog post that it has made significant improvement in how its vehicles operate and logged 700,000 total test miles — up from the 500,000 it disclosed it had logged last year.
“Over the last year, we’ve shifted the focus of the Google self-driving car project onto mastering city street driving,” Google said in a blog post. “We still have lots of problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we tackle another town, but thousands of situations on city streets that would have stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously.”
The company’s efforts helped spurt interest and several major automakers are also working feverishly to make self-driving cars and largely autonomous cars a reality.