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Voici, ci-dessous, le texte qui est à lire pour mardi prochain (le 27 janvier) et voici les 2 questions à traiter : 1) What are the advantages/pros of this project ?
2) What are the inconvenients/cons of this project ?
Google’s Next Phase in Driverless Cars: No Steering Wheel or Brake Pedals
By JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California. — Humans might be the one problem Google can’t solve.
For the past four years, Google has been working on self-driving cars with a mechanism to return
control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency. But Google’s brightest minds now
say they can’t make that handoff work anytime soon.
Their answer? Take the driver completely out of the driving.
The company has begun building a fleet1 of 100 experimental electric-powered vehicles that will
dispense with all the standard controls found in modern automobiles. The two-seat vehicle looks a
bit like the ultracompact Fiat 500 or the Mercedes-Benz Smart car if you take out the steering
wheel, gas pedal, brake and gear shift. The only things the driver controls is a red “e-stop” button
for panic stops and a separate start button.
The car would be summoned2 with a smartphone application. It would pick up a passenger and
automatically drive to a destination selected on a smartphone app without any human intervention.
The vehicles will have electronic sensors that can see about 600 feet in all directions. Despite that,
they will have rearview mirrors because they are required by California’s vehicle code, Dr.
Urmson said. The front of the car will be made from a foamlike3 material in case the computer fails
and it hits a pedestrian.
Google’s prototype for its new cars will limit them to a top speed of 25 miles per hour. The cars
are intended for driving in urban and suburban settings, not on highways. The low speed will
probably keep the cars out of more restrictive regulatory categories for vehicles, giving them more
design flexibility.
Laws permit autonomous vehicles in California, Nevada and Florida. But those laws have
generally been written with the expectation that a human driver would be able to take control in
emergencies.
In the future, Google hopes to persuade regulators4 that the cars can operate safely without driver,
steering wheel, brake or accelerator pedal. Those cars would rely entirely on5 Google sensors and
software to control them.
1. Ici : Un parc automobile 2. appelée 3. comparable à de la mousse 4. Someone who checks if the
law is followed 5. Rely on = Dépendre de.
