Riding in a Driverless Taxi at CES Driverless Taxi,Technology News | BBC English News | Everyday Big News

Riding in a Driverless Taxi at CES 

Driverless Taxi, Technology News.

I've seen a lot of techs so far here at CES like if you walk through any of the halls with cars in them there are tons of like open room concepts and things like that,

But they feel kind of useless you know like as long as they're still on a concept phase they don't really feel real yet the idea is we're building the interiors of these cars now for this autonomous future,

Where you don't have to be sitting at the wheel so you can turn around face your friends you kind of feel like you're in a moving room lots of glass it's very different.

I've seen a lot of that all over the show floor really far out stuff crazy shapes huge chunks of glass and stuff built for autonomy actually BMW.

I think had a sort of a happy medium they showed me what they called the I next which is sort of a really futuristic vision of a next-gen car but not too far in the future so it has these wide-open spaces and touch-sensitive fabrics and surfaces for gestures,

But it still sort of seems like a normal car but still without the actual self-driving tech in action as just kind of half the story so then I got an email from a company called Yandex.you may know them as Russian.

The tech company and they said they come to check out our autonomous car at CES I'm kind of thinking okay well I've seen a lot of autonomous concepts and things like that how could this be much different,

But then they said listen we have a fully autonomous driverless car hitting the streets of Las Vegas with all the other regular cars right now you can go for a ride you in so I super in let's do it.

So the car itself is a retrofitted Prius on top is radar lidar and camera array for the car to map out its surroundings I think I saw one who's used the autopilot from a Tesla it helps me to not be as nervous in the backseat,

But it's still crazy not having anyone in the driver's seat at all as the car navigates the streets there's a safety engineer in the passenger seat.

Which had a kill switch next to him for if anything happened to go wrong or it needed to be interrupted but we did about a 15-minute loop around real streets real driver’s real people and everything went smoothly.

Driverless Taxi , Technology News 

It was kind of still trippy the whole time this really feels like the future I got say it might not be this crazy soft driving the interior that everyone else is talking about,

But this tech part is cool to me, the details are that this is a small area in Las Vegas that was already mapped by this company.

So it was a predetermined route and the car knew where it was going to go but everything else Road conditions the other cars the pedestrians the traffic lights.

The turns speed changes all of that was decisions made by the car but all that makes sense for a taxi I mean you map the town or the city you want to be in you have predetermined routes for pick-up and drop-off.

Driverless Taxi, Technology News

The taxis are driverless and they just go from there and the even cooler needier part is these iPod pros you're seeing that's a visualization of what the sensors on top of the car are seeing in real-time,

So the radar lieder and cameras are all combining to identify what is other cars on the road what's pedestrians what is a stationary object and seeing things up to 250 meters away in every direction,

So things six-seven cars away we're on the iPod that I couldn't even see in real-life out the windows so there are some red paths and when we start driving you're gone see some green paths,

And basically what I'm seeing here is it's evaluating what's currently happening on the road and what's about to happen red paths green paths well. 

Driverless Taxi, Technology News

It takes the green path and has a predetermined destination we're on a left turning lane so you can see the way up ahead where it wants to go,

 It's just gonna fall out where I can't base on the cars around us you can't really merge right now so those paths are red it has a green path.

It has a bunch of other possible paths to take if it wants to switch it up but right now it's all green and the best part is the reaction from other people on the road was pretty great there are people pulling out their phones to record the driverless car people kind of stare a little bit at stoplights,

When they realize what's going on and apparently, Las Vegas cops think it's pretty funny too but overall the 15 minutes we've spent in this car were a lot of fun I learned a lot just looking at these iPods.

What they were seeing as the car drove around and this gave me a sort of optimism for the future of self-driving tech so that's pretty much it figured.

Driverless Taxi, Technology News

I would share my experience would you let yourself get driven in a driverless taxi like this maybe share this video with other people.

You think would be interested in Driverless Taxi and I'll leave some links below with some more information so you can look it up if you want to see that too, either way, thanks for watching see you guys next one peace.