A reporter from The Atlantic gets his hands on Google's self-driving car

Google's self-driving car has been on the road for five years now, at various levels of autonomy. From the ease and relative serenity of California's arrow-straight highways, the car drove hundreds of thousands of miles with a greater level of concentration and mastery than the wandering attention spans of humans could accomplish. In 2012, Google shifted from the freeways to the cities, navigating a far more convoluted set of challenges: the slow-speed chaos that comes with any city, any suburb, any place with people and cars in it.

Google has driven around its Mountain View, Calif., home for thousands of miles, dodging cyclists and delivery trucks and the riff-raff of techy suburbia. Eric Jaffe of The Atlantic's Cities blog was one of the first journalists invited to sit in the backseat of Google's self-driving car, while software lead Dmitri Dolgov and lead test driver Brian Torcellini rode up front. During the drive, they did "no more to guide the vehicle than I'm doing from the back seat," reported Jaffe.

Most of Google's cars have been Toyota Priuses, but Google employs about two dozen Lexus RX 450h crossovers, large enough to handle all the equipment to make the autonomy work. A "bucket" on the roof spins 10 times a second as it emits laser beams to map its environment in 3-D. Four-direction radar bounces forth 150 meters "to perceive things a human driver never could." And there's a big red button -- "'Every robot has a big red button,' says Dolgov" -- as a kill switch.

Nobody at Google has reportedly ever had to use the kill switch.

Google cars have been involved in two crashes. The first crash, says Google, was caused by a human. In the second crash, a Google car was rear-ended, by another human. In a statement by Google, project director Chris Urmson announced that over 700,000 miles have been covered by autonomous cars.

"Over the next few minutes, the autonomous vehicle makes several maneuvers that someone less privy to Dolgov's first rule would have been tempted to compliment," Jaffe reports from the back seat. "We go through a yellow light, the car having calculated in a fraction of a second that stopping would have been more dangerous. We push past a nearby car waiting to merge into our lane, because our vehicle's computer knows we have the right-of-way. We change into the right lane for a seemingly pointless reason until, a minute later, the car signals a right turn. We go the exact speed limit because maps the car consults tell it this road's exact speed limit. The car identifies orange cones in the shoulder and we drift laterally in our lane, to give any road workers more space."

The above video from Google shows its computers distilling "what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye," said Urmson, into something easily analyzed by computers. Sensors detect construction zones, they slow down for railroad crossings. The forward path is a green ribbon, while cars are purple cubes. Overall: The Google car thinks just like we do and is able to navigate complex driving tasks that, your average driver believes, the average drivers around him can't handle.

There's still much work to be done, of course: "One of the main limiting factors," writes Jaffe, "is that any city where the self-driving car can go must first be mapped with a precision far greater than what even Google Maps achieves." The tether for autonomy needs to be cut. People need to trust autonomous cars -- first with taxis, Urmson theorizes. So do the company's accountants, who have just increased Google's investment in ride-sharing Uber.

Despite the fretting of some enthusiasts who believe self-driving cars to be a McCarthy-esque specter taking away their manual-shifted sports cars, autonomous cars are a technology, closer than we could ever believe, that has the power to change the world. Ninety percent of car crashes are due to user error, cites Urmson, and approximately 35,000 people died in car accidents last year (a downward trend, thankfully, but still a large number). The average American wastes 52 minutes a day commuting, said Urmson, equal to 4 percent of their lives.

"If I could give you 4 percent more life, you'd take it."

For the full story -- including the time Jaffe and company nearly hit a truck, autonomously -- head to The Atlantic Cities.