Self Driving Cars: Market Players Give An Aggressive Push To Their Ideas And Strategies To Make Their Concept A Reality

Self Driving Cars is deemed the next big thing in the auto industry. Not only automakers but even some technology companies are also working on their own self driving car projects. Reports on Google’s plans to launch its ‘Driverless car’ are already rife. Looking at the advent of events at Google, it can be deciphered that Google is aggressively pushing its strategies to materialize its ‘Driverless Car’ project.

Earlier, this month, Google had introduced a website that will provide monthly updates on its driverless car project and as a 9 to 5 Google report points out, the new site is a result of the search engine giant getting attention on the safety of the driverless cars and a report claimed its prototypes have encountered three accidents within a year of putting the car under trial.

According to a recent report on PC World, Google’s self driving car team is going through a major expansion. More than half of the Google’s Driverless cars are now legal in California. As per the records at Department of Motor Vehicles, California, the company has been issued 48 permits for driverless vehicles as on June 18 and about a month ago, Google just had 23 permits. The search engine giant said, the additional 25 permits are for a new fleet of prototype cars that are being tested on private roads, reports PC World. The publication also mentioned, California’s driverless car fleet has hit 77 vehicles, which includes two new permits issued to Mercedes Benz that is also making serious advancements in the driverless cars space.

Electric car maker, Tesla Motors runs the second biggest fleet at 12 cars (after Google) and the company is working towards providing a software update to its production cars that will automate highway driving. With 202 drivers, Google has the largest autonomous car operator pool and that constitutes just under two thirds of the 306 people licensed to operate autonomous cars in California, reports PC World.

Besides Google, Tesla Motors and Mercedes Benz, mobile ride hailing app company Uber also appears to be a serious contender in the self driving car segment. In April, a report on CIO said that Uber was hiring professionals to fill various job positions at its new Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh. The research center that focuses on developing self driving car technology and advanced vehicle safety and mapping systems is seeking engineers in the field of robotics, communications, machine learning, traffic simulation, vehicle testing and software and hardware development.

The company had recently hired Google’s Engineering VP, Brian McClendon who will now oversee the transportation network at Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, Re/Code reported.

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