Life

What It's Like to Ride in a Self-Driving Car

Jan. 7, 2015

Win McNamee/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to ride in a self-driving car? Given that we’ve been hearing about them as a real, honest-to-goodness technological innovation for a few years now (hi there, Google car!), it’s only natural that most of us would start getting curious. And guess what? We’re in luck: Automotive company Valeo recently invited Business Insider’s Will Wei and Jay Yarrow to take a test drive (test ride? I mean, the car drives itself, so can we really still call the experience a test drive?) in a vehicle equipped with its “Cruise4U” system, and they videoed the whole thing.

They rode around the streets of Las Vegas, and — perhaps unsurprisingly — it’s pretty impressive: It starts, it drives, it brakes itself, and so on. But it’s worth noting that just because your car drives itself, that doesn’t mean you can totally tune out. The difference between a highly automated vehicle and an autonomous one, the Valeo rep explained to Wei and Yarrow, is that the driver is still responsible for handling the highly automated one. You kind of have to work with the car to enable it to drive itself — being aware of your surroundings, making sure the driving environment is safe and legal, and taking back control of the car if necessary (which can be done at the push of a button). Head on over to Business Insider to watch the video.

As Wei noted, though, “It turns out that with so many variables on the road, driving a self-driving car can be just as stressful as driving a regular car.” To which all I can say is: True. That. I’m a little bit anxious, kind of a control freak, and occasionally have trust issues, so I imagine the stages of riding in a self-driving car would go something like this for me: