Google showcases their next driverless car prototype:

The two-seater prototype vehicle is Google’s reimagination of what the modern automobile should look and feel like if you took the human out of the transportation equation and designed something solely to chauffeur passengers from point A to B.

The car — which was conceived and designed by Google, unlike the ones it previously modified — lacks many of the trappings of a normal car, and that includes the three essentials: A steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake pedal.

From a tech point of view, I am amazed at the complexity  that they had to overcome and engineering prowess of the team. From a design point of view, I think Google needs to hire some better industrial designers.

Lastly, from an urbanism point of view, I think that this project is almost diametrically opposed to good urbanism. Just listen to Google co-founder Sergey Brin:

“The project is about changing the world for people who are not well-served by transportation today,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the inaugural Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “There’s not great public transportation in many public places in the United States.”

We have had a 50+ year collective social experiment in this country privatizing personal mobility into private mobility subsidized by the public, at the expense of creating an efficient economy-of-scale driven transportation network. The personal car is unbelievably useful, but we have swung so far toward subsidizing personal transportation at the expense of any other transportation mode that we are only just recovering our cities from past errors.

Equitably investing in different modes of public to private transportation increases the net freedom of the individual to choose to take the subway; to choose to buy a car; to choose to walk or bike to work. Increasing choice increases our sphere of freedom.

Hopefully the introduction of driverless cars will reduce the crushing yearly death toll from motor vehicles – 34,080 for 2012 alone – and make the streets safer for other drivers who aren’t wrapped in 2,000 pounds of steel, glass, and plastic.

If anything, I hope firms such as ZipCar or Uber pioneer the use of driverless cars; we don’t need any net increase in vehicles on the road,  more roads, or more parking, but we can use those roads smarter. That would be my hope for driverless cars.