Google Mulling Plan To Sell Self-Driving Cars. Soon.

Two years. That is the time frame within which Google is thinking it may be possible to autonomous (self-driving) cars. 

There are five levels of autonomous driving, with increasing degrees of autonomy. A cute robot does not figure in any of the plans, but not-so-cute algorithms that make this vision a reality already exist - and the company is engaging with regulators, safety officials et al to figure out the practical means of doing so much sooner than most people realize. JL

Brooke Crothers reports in Forbes:

“[The full autonomous] vehicle is what you see today. This is not a car we’re planning to sell. All it has is a ‘go’ button, a ‘slow down and stop’ button, and ‘stop really quickly’ button. The intention is for the passenger to get into the vehicle, say into a microphone take me to [some location], and the car does the entire journey for you.Our ambition is to get there by 2017."
Google executive offered a brief history of the company’s autonomous vehicle project and indicated that it is mulling the possibility of selling cars in the future.
Speaking on Thursday at the California Public Utilities Commission, Sarah Hunter, Head of Public Policy at the Google Self-Driving Car Project (GoogleX) offered a snapshot of the thinking process.   The news was first reported by The Guardian.
Selling/manufacturing a Google Car: “A model where we manufacture cars for sale will require the same sort of electric vehicle charging…there’s nothing unusual about the charging requirements of our vehicles,” she said. 
Later, she elaborated.  ”We haven’t’ decided yet how we’re going to bring this to market. Right now our engineers are trying to figure out the answers to all of the difficult questions…how to make a car genuinely drive itself. Once we figure that out, we’ll figure out how to bring it to market.”
Hunter continued. “Is it going to be something we manufacture at scale [or] sell to individuals [or] something that we own and operate as a service? We just don’t know. How people want to use these vehicles is very difficult to predict. Everyone has a very different use case. [For example] it’s going to take my kids to the after-school sports practice [or] taking [someone] to the store. It’s very difficult at this stage to understand what actually is going to be the human social need for the vehicles. Once we’ve built the car, we can figure that out.”
History of Google Self-Driving Car Project: Hunter also explained the various stages Google went through to get to where it is today.  “When we started six years ago, it was retrofitting ordinary cars. We started with the Prius. We then moved on to a Lexus . We bought ordinary cars and applied lots of sensors to them. We put them on the vehicles and we developed the software to be able to ensure the car could get pretty good at autonomous driving. In fact we got to — I don’t know if you’d call it a level 2* or level 3 — a relatively competent autonomous driving experience for freeway driving. We got there several years ago. We enabled ordinary people from Google to try the car.”“Then we decided to switch paths. The ability for drivers to stay in the loop was quite limited. When a car drives itself on a freeway our instinct as humans is to switch off. With a level 2 or level 3 car you have to be able to take control again. We discovered that was quite hard to get humans to do. [We decided that] for us, as a computer science company, it’s probably easier for us to build a much more autonomous vehicle — a level 4 vehicle — than it is to try to understand how to keep humans engaged in that task.”
Current status: “[The full autonomous] vehicle is what you see today. This is not a car we’re planning to sell. We’re only making a few hundred of them. We’re making them to enable our team to learn how to build a self-driving vehicle from the ground up. It’s the first vehicle that’s designed just for self-driving. It has no steering wheel, no brake pedals, no manual controls at all. All it has is a ‘go’ button, a ‘please slow down and stop’ button, and ‘stop really quickly’ button. The intention is for the passenger to get into the vehicle, say into a microphone take me to [some location], and the car does the entire journey for you.”
“Our ambition is to get there by 2017,” Hunter added.
*NOTE: Steven Shladover, California PATH Program Manager, spelled out the five levels of autonomous driving.
Level 1: e.g., adaptive cruise control
Level 2: e.g., combine adaptive cruise control with automatic lane keeping
Level 3: driver can temporarily stop paying attention to the driving and, for example, text or read
Level 4: driver can disengage for a more extensive period of time, maybe even go to sleep, but still restricted in their operating domains, only operate on limited access freeway
Level 5: can replace drivers completely. Can drive anywhere people can drive under the full range of conditions. “Many, many decades in the future,” according to Shladover.