11 Reasons for BuyingKatey Troutman April 30 2014 Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) driverless cars are on the road to overcoming a new obstacle: city streets. The cars have been able to easily navigate the interstate and highways so far, but urban driving has proven to be much more difficult for the software engineers behind the autonomous vehicles said by project director Chris Urmson. Google published a blog post on Monday, indicating that the company’s self-driving cars are making rapid progress though. The project leader states in the entry that the team was able to develop the computer software of the car so it can cope with some of the more common problems that come with driving in town. “We are growing more confident that we are moving towards an attainable target a vehicle that is completely functioning without human intervention,” Urmson said in the blog post. “We’ve developed our program so it can simultaneously identify hundreds of distinct objects pedestrians buses a stop sign aid by a crossing guard or a bicycle making movements signaling a potential turn. A self-driving car will pay attention to all of these things in a way that is physically impossible for a human being and it never gets distracted. “Urmson says he hopes that by 2017 Google will be able to unveil the technology to the general public. The tech giant continues to claim that one day computers will drive faster and more effectively than humans and the company says that while initial models will need a human operator ready to take over if the machine eventually fails, according to USA Today, people should be able to read work or even sleep in the autonomous vehicles. Since the initial project attempts, engineers have helped the program become more advanced and more able to predict possible scenarios. Now the cars are able to drive autonomously on the city streets in Mountain View California after driving more than 10,000 or so mileswith a few hitches. “We still have many problems to solve, including teaching the car to drive more streets in Mountain View before we get to grips with another area, but thousands of situations on city streets that stumped us two years ago can now be navigated autonomously,” Urmson said. Among these problems is driving in rain and fog knowing when it’s okay to turn right on red and maybe most complicated of all recognizing the movements and hand signals that drivers send each other to indicate that it’s okay to merge lanes of shift etc. Given everything the co-founder of the company Sergey Brin said in 2012 “You can count on one hand the number of years before ordinary people will experience this.”