TAIPEI, Taiwan — Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States and Institute for Information Industry (III) in Taiwan recently jointly demonstrated Taiwan’s first type of lightweight driverless smart car, the Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV), which will undergo test trials at the end of this year at earliest. However, self-driving is one of the unmistakable trends at 2016 CES.
“The industry has been making continuous incremental gains, but for self-driving cars to reach their full potential we need to focus on nothing short of full autonomy,” John Krafcik, Chief Executive of Google’s self-driving car division, said on Tuesday at the Detroit Auto Show.
“Why full autonomy? Because mobility should be open to the millions of people around the world who don’t have the privilege of holding a drivers licence.” said John Krafcik.
“Our objective is not to minimize disengagements,” Google said in the report. “Rather, it is to gather, while operating safely, as much data as possible to enable us to improve our self-driving system. Therefore, we set disengagement thresholds conservatively, and each is carefully recorded.”
In fact, Google plays an important role in making self-driving cars go mainstream. What PEV demonstrates is more like a prototype, Google has the power to negotiate with those automakers.
It is widely circulated that Google and Ford Motor Co. are in talks about forming a partnership to develop autonomous car technology.
Google says it is in talks with many automakers.
“We’re not going to comment on rumor or speculation about specific conversations,” Google said in a statement.
Certainly, self-driving is likely to be a hot topic in 2016.
