Chris Urmson, the director of self-driving cars at Google, is committed to ensuring the driverless vehicles are standard within five years -- because he wants his 11-year-old son never to have to take a driver's test.
"My team are committed to making sure that [driver's test] doesn't happen," Urmson said Tuesday at the TED 2015 conference in Vancouver, BBC reported.
Google began testing its driverless cars in 2009, and this past December the company revealed the first complete prototype of the automated vehicle. Urmson elaborated on Google's philosophy around the project during his speech on Tuesday, according to the official TED blog, explaining that throughout the history of the motor vehicle, "we’ve been working around the least reliable part of the car: the driver."
Removing the capacity for human error could greatly reduce road accidents, Urmson said, in which 1.2 million people are killed globally every year. "The urgency is so large," he said. "We’re looking forward to having this technology on the road."
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