Future of cars: drivers not needed

Almaty. January 10. Kazakhstan Today - Google announced it had developed a fleet of cars that use various sensors and maps to feel out the roadway, CNN reports.

"They have driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles.

A $100,000 car from Mercedes aims to give the human foot a rest in traffic jams. It senses how far away other cars are - and then speeds up and slows down accordingly. No need to turn off cruise control and hit the brake. You just steer.

The latest edition in this trend comes from General Motors, which showed off a self-driving car last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The EN-V (pronounced "envy" and short for "Electric Networked Vehicle") combines two ideas about how to teach cars to drive - using sensors like cameras and sonar to keep the car from hitting pedestrians; and network technology that lets cars talk to each other.

This "car internet" lets the cars link up wirelessly and follow one another in a sort of wirelessly linked train. If one EN-V needed to pull out of the line, it could.

The EN-V runs on battery power and plugs into a wall - giving it a max speed of about 30 miles per hour and a range of about 30 miles. That's not far or fast, but it's enough to make the EN-V useful for cutting down congestion in urban settings, particularly high-density cities in China and India.

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