Autonomous autos: Self-driving cars on roads in 2 to 5 years, Google predicts

Google has begun discussions with most of the world’s top automakers and has assembled a team of traditional and nontraditional suppliers to speed efforts to bring self-driving cars to market by 2020, a Google executive said on Wednesday. ”We’d be remiss not to talk to … the biggest auto manufacturers. They’ve got a lot to offer,” Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car project, said in an interview. Google has not determined whether it will build its own self-driving vehicles or function more as a provider of systems and software to established vehicle manufacturers, including General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co, Toyota Motor Corp, Daimler AG and Volkswagen AG; Google’s self-driving prototype cars were built in theU.S. city of Detroit by engineering and specialty manufacturing company Roush.

You’re changing what it means to get around. … You look at a car … and people forget just how much magic there is in that thing.

Chris Urmson, director of Google’s self-driving car project

Urmson’s expectation that the first fully autonomous vehicles will be production-ready within five years mirrors the view expressed a day earlier by Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc. Musk, who spoke Tuesday at the Automotive News World Congress conference, said he expects the lack of clear federal regulations covering self-driving cars could delay their introduction until 2022 or 2023. Google has been briefing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the chief U.S. auto regulator, “from early on in our program,” Urmson said. He added that self-driving cars could be an opportunity to extend motoring to blind, elderly and disabled persons who otherwise could not drive.

Technology