See all Motoring NewsGoogle is famously working on driverless cars; Mercedes-Benz says the new S-Class is capable of it and is just waiting on legislation to catch up; and Volvo recently announced it was to unleash 100 autonomous vehicles onto the streets of Gothenburg as part of its plan to ensure "that no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car by 2020."
Now too it looks as if Apple wants a piece of the driverless car market - or at least that's what this video from The Smart Department would have us believe. The Cupertino firm is not (that we know) actually interested in driverless cars, but the tech giant's SIRI app was required to create Steeri - the world's first driverless app.
While the video has obviously been made for fun, it does show one of the major problems that is likely to hold back autonomous cars. Computers and the software that controls them are only as 'smart' as the people who designed them and as anybody who has been subjected to the Apple Maps fiasco, the on-going debacle that is the Samsung S3 'Jelly Bean' issue (this writer included) or tried to do anything other than play solitaire on Windows Vista will tell you; sometimes the technicians get it wrong.
Apple and Google's issues were bad (I leave out Microsoft as Vista really was a dog's dinner) but they are unlikely to have brought their users into life-threatening situations; something that could conceivable happen if your car's software has a 'hiccup' on the motorway.
Take a look at the Steeri video, laugh and maybe wonder if steering and braking yourself are really that difficult.
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