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Google Announces Self-Driving “Google NASCAR Racing” For April Fools’ Day

Submitted by on April 1, 2012 – 12:03 pm8 Comments
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Google announced today a partnership with sports giant NASCAR, unveiling a self-driving stock car that the search engine says will be entered in competition within the year. But if you can’t wait to see the unmanned vehicle racing at speeds of 200mph– or if you’re furious that NASCAR could be taken over by robots– don’t be: the stunt is just Google’s annual April Fools’ Day joke.

“Ever since mankind could go fast, we have longed to go faster,” writes co-founder (and supposed autonomous car tester) Sergey Brin. “And ever since we’ve done work, we have longed to have someone else, or something else, do that work for us.”

“Having skidded around a parking lot last week myself, I’m pretty sure that none of those test miles were as hard as it will be for one of our cars to hold its own in a field of 43 jacked-up, 800-horsepower beasts screaming down a straightaway within inches of each other at upwards of 200 miles per hour,” he added.

The story is actually not entirely made up: Google certainly does have a self-driving car initiative that has already achieved feats worthy of science fiction. The vehicles have indeed “been test-driven (or rather, test-ridden) for more than 200,000 miles without a single machine-caused mishap.”

What do you think? Will driver-less cars one day race for our amusement?

[via Google Blog]

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