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Technology and Information Technology

It’s not just Google. High-end car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz are looking into ways to make their cars autonomous, as shown at this car show.

The last layer of the autonomous car is the ability to take all of the information it gathers and translate that into meaning- ful action, such as applying the brakes or making a turn. The computerized systems that translate such inputs already exist in most modern cars. The difference is that in current cars the input is provided by a human, whereas in autonomous cars the input will be data-driven. The final push that may be needed to get self-driving cars from prototype tomass-market is real-time car-to-car communication. While radars and sensors in current vehicles canhelp a self-driver avoid accidents, the technology involved is very short-range and somewhat limited. For example, a sensor may be able to detect if a car is crossing into another lane or is about to hit a vehicle

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