During a speech at SXSW, Astro Teller, head of Google X, said that the company decided to completely remove the steering wheel and brakes from the prototype autonomous car it is building because the human factor is not reliable for the automatic driving system.
According to his statements, Gοogle has already “learned” driving on the highway. The company has tested hundreds of thousands of hours of autonomous driving on California highways, even putting employees to test the car in real conditions. Employees who were not working on the secret project of the Google X department tried it on the route from home to their work, with the condition, however, that they would be very strict and careful in their observations.
What they unfortunately discovered, however, is that people very quickly showed trust in the automatic car, which the project. They had to drive the car to the highway, where from there the automatic driving system would take over, and they had to observe its behavior. However, even while driving the experimental car, the drivers were talking or writing on their phones and were not focused on driving. This made Teller think about what could happen if the driver completely trusted the automatic car.
With this reasoning, the project took a new direction, and now they are working on teaching the car to drive autonomously in the city, without needing a human driver. For this reason, the steering wheel and brakes were removed, so that no one needs to take over the driving.
