It's Google. They have the right people, the right ideas, the resources, and they started first. Source: I'm a prof in a related field with graduated PhD students at Google.

The Google cars get press because they are really very good.

I believe we covered the "fawning from fanboys" part already.

>Source: I'm a prof in a related field with graduated PhD students at Google.

That's not a "source". That's at best a "full discosure" and at worst a "conflict of interest" in this discussion...

For the record, none of my former students work on the Google cars as far as I know.

By the way: " Mercedes missed a barn-door sized opportunity last week when it revealed technical details of next year's 2014 S-class, which showed that while this flagship model could potentially have been the world's first autonomous driving car, Mercedes has decided not to give it that capability. For now, the driver's hands have to remain on the wheel at all times.

"The car would do it [autonomous driving] today," said Jochen Haab technical support manager, "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" http://www.roadandtrack.com/go/first-looks/new-car-tech-2014...

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-autos-mercede...

Well, shit, that quote right there plus your hostile attitude sure have me impressed. 62 whole miles! They're clearly on the doorstep of releasing a production autonomous car, as you were trying to imply over at <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6408590>.

Meanwhile, that other company's car has made the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles (at least 380 miles, in case you didn't know):

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/sebastian-thrun-se...

That was two years ago.

Here's a suggestion: why don't you just take a step back from the topic of Google, since you clearly get all twisted up inside about it?

I'm here to impress you sir, that's my mission in life.

Now who said that they drove a total of 62 miles vs a 62 mile trip? Did the car crash at mile 62 or they reached the destination? All these are little details that need to be taken in consideration before an idiot exclaims "Google is #1 in autonomous cars..."

By the way, see anything funny http://i.bnet.com/blogs/google-self-driving-car.jpg sticking out of the Mercedes car http://www.trbimg.com/img-522e6325/turbine/la-fi-hy-autos-20... ? Don't tell me they have shrunk it to make it fits inside a normal car already. How much does the Google system cost now, is it $100K+ just for the autonomous driving system? Details, details, details

I didn't say anything about total miles; I was comparing Mercedes' single 62 mile trip against the other car's single 380+ mile trip. But if you want to bring up total miles logged, That Company In Mountain View hit 300k miles last year [1] and there are absolutely no public numbers from Mercedes. If the figure were impressive, they'd probably have released it.

But now you want to make a fuss over the LIDAR on top of That Company's car while the S Class gets by on just radar. Your earlier post quoted a Mercedes engineer saying "we have had test cars doing that, but what happens if a child steps out into the street and the radar misses it?" -- well, gosh, maybe that funny spinning thing is doing something useful. Wouldn't you want an autonomous car to use any and every available method to detect obstacles? Details indeed.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-self-driving-car-...