Mountain View, California - Google has revealed that its self-driving cars don't just know how to change lanes and run yellow lights - now, they can even honk the horn like a regular human.
As the company's test cars trundle around on public roads, Google has begun training its computers to rely on the hooter in specific scenarios, such as when another driver is backing out of a space and can't see that Google's vehicle is approaching. At other times, it'll hoot when another driver starts edging into the occupied lane.
The company is only just beginning to roll out this feature after testing the hooter inside the car itself; engineers didn't want the vehicle to blast away at other people unnecessarily or by mistake. So when the car accidentally hooted at someone during testing, only the Googlers on the inside could hear it and correct for it by teaching the computer that that wasn't an appropriate time to honk.
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Although the system is likely to require a lot more fine-tuning, it's easy to imagine that someday Google's hooting will be more reliable and understandable than human hooting. Think about your last car ride; did somebody hoot at you? Did it happen because there was truly an immediate and urgent danger, or was it just because the person behind the wheel was having a bad day? Sometimes, it's hard to tell.
But Google appears to want its driverless car to be more judicious with its use of the horn.
“If another vehicle is slowly reversing towards us, we might sound two short, quieter pips as a friendly heads-up to let the driver know we're behind them,” the company wrote in its latest monthly driverless car report. “However, if there's a situation that requires more urgency, we'll use one loud sustained hoot.”
Washington Post