Google cars may be future threat to industry

Google could become a "serious competitive threat" to the car industry if it continues to push its self-driving cars, Mark Reuss, product-development chief at General Motors has warned.

GM, which is developing its own autonomous vehicle technology, isn’t in a race with Google to create driverless cars, he said.

Google announced last month it plans to deploy at least 100 fully autonomous vehicles that it designed in tests starting this year. The two-seat cars will have a top speed of 40 km per hour and no steering wheel. Google previously had been testing its technology in other vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius.

“Anybody can do anything with enough time and money,” Reuss said. “If they set their mind to it, I have no doubt” that they could become a very serious competitive threat.”

GM demonstrated last year what it calls Super Cruise technology, which will support semi-automated driving features, including hands-off lane following, braking and speed control under certain conditions. GM also has an autonomous vehicle project called EN-V that it’s been developing in China. The soft drink machine-sized pods don’t look like normal cars.

The industry will phase in autonomous vehicles over years, Reuss said.

Google persuaded states including California to pass laws explicitly legalising the technology.

Though California’s rules will go into effect in June 2015, barriers remain to the widespread availability of the cars of the future, whether made by Google or traditional automakers.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has until the end of the year to finalise rules for the public’s use of driverless cars (there is a 180-day lag between then and when a car might be permitted to hit the road). That’s plenty of time for regulators to include requirements that manufacturers consider onerous, and thus delay the debut of a driverless car.

More fundamentally, how do authorities know that the car drives safely under a range of conditions?