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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

NPR's Robert Siegel interviewed Chris Urmson, the technical director of the Google self-driving car project. The article starts off by noting that people surveyed by Ford in India and China have shown much more positive interest than those in the U.S. and U.K. towards buying or riding in a self-driving vehicle. From the interview [npr.org]:

On why we need self-driving cars

It really starts with safety. In America, there's 33,000 people [dot.gov] that are killed on the road every year, and to put that in perspective, that's equivalent of a 737 falling out of the sky five days a week. ... There is just a tremendous opportunity there to save lives — 94 percent of those accidents are due to human error, and the good news is we can build software and hardware that can see the road and pay attention all the time and react more quickly and keep people safe on the road. The other big aspect is accessibility. When you think about the baby boomer generation, they're starting to get to a point where they feel uncomfortable driving or their family feels uncomfortable about them driving. Making sure they have access to transportation, to continue to do all the things they do today — to go and visit their grandchildren or just to go to a coffee shop — we think that is an incredibly important use for this type of technology.

On the proposed regulations [ca.gov] by California's Department of Motor Vehicles that self-driving cars have a licensed driver inside

We've always thought that having a driver in a vehicle while testing makes a tremendous amount of sense ... the whole point of the system is to have someone in the vehicle who can observe and keep things safe. But once the technology is actually out on the road, I think that it isn't the right answer. I think the idea is to give more people mobility, and by increasing the requirements on the person who's driving the vehicle when they should be doing less doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

On whether someone should be able to override the controls

It really depends what you mean by "take over controls." You wouldn't imagine that in the back of a taxi, we put an extra steering wheel or brake pedal there for the passenger to grab ahold of anytime. It would just be crazy to think about doing that. But at the same time, I could imagine that there are vehicles where most of the days you don't really want to drive it, so let it take you to and from work in the morning, for example, but on the weekend when you get a chance to get out onto some open road, that you might enjoy driving in that location. But I think the idea that you want the person to jump in who hasn't been paying attention or maybe had a couple of drinks with dinner and then jump in to override is probably not the right idea.

Original Submission