Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Self-Driving Cars - The Future of Transportation

By Julie Griffin, Contributing Writer

Who wants to drive back from a weekend in Las Vegas with an unforgivable hangover? The answer: No one. We are closer than ever to making that happen— literally traveling by car with no one behind the wheel, and Nevada is the first state that’s open to it, as Nevada currently offers “non-driver’s licenses” for autonomous vehicles.

By next February self-driving cars will be available to consumers. The vehicle pioneering this event will likely be the Volkswagen Passat, which has already journeyed over 10,000 miles— 6,500 of which were across the state of Nevada.

Autonomous vehicles are commonplace in military settings because these vehicles have become the manner in which the U.S. Navy and other military services are leaning towards for methods of modern war. The reason? The U.S. Navy started to rely on Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) during the Afghanistan war was to assess the situation from a safe distance to determine if violence was necessary.

This line of thinking was parallel to Google’s (News

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