The Google Self-driving car is one of those technologies that everyone knows will have a major impact on society but no one knows quite the when or how or, importantly, who. According to Elon Musk, he'd like Tesla Motors to be the "who."
In a scoop by Bloomberg, Musk tells them he's talked to Google about their self-driving car technology, although how far those talks have gone isn't quite clear. I've talked to James Earl Jones about guns and BBQ but it doesn't mean we're opening up a shooting range/BBQ joint. Although, maybe we should.
Most intriguingly, Musk wants to refer to the system as "autopilot," which is something I agree with.
“I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self- driving,” Musk said in an interview. “Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.”
Most importantly, the article underlines that the system is too expensive now for mass execution (you can see how Google's self-driving car works here). Musk's big challenge is to build an affordable electric car and to do that you'd probably need to use a system that uses purely optical sensors and not a 64-beam laser + radar system that Google is using.
UPDATE: As we sort of guessed, this was just a general observation and not new technology.
Photo: AP Images