If you're a bad driver, watch out - Google's driverless cars might start honking at you.
In its monthly report on driverless cars, Google has revealed it is "teaching them to honk".
The cars will honk to "alert other drivers" to their presence - when a driver swerves into the wrong lane, for example, or a car is "backing out of a blind driveway".
"During testing, we taught our vehicles to distinguish between potentially tricky situations and false positives, i.e. the difference between a car facing the wrong way during a three-point turn and one that's about to drive down the wrong side of the road," the report explains.
At first, the horn was only played inside the car - "so we wouldn't confuse others on the road with a wayward beep" - with test drivers noting when the beep was and wasn't appropriate. This data was then fed back to an engineering team that refined the software.
The cars can now differentiate between situations and adjust their honks accordingly - a "friendly heads up" would prompt two short, quiet honks, while a more urgent situation would trigger "one loud, sustained honk".
Google likes to think of its cars as politer than some of the more horn-happy drivers on the roads, though.
"The human act of honking may be (performance) art, but our self-driving cars aim to be polite, considerate, and only honk when it makes driving safer for everyone," it wrote.
"Our goal is to teach our cars to honk like a patient, seasoned driver. As we become more experienced honkers, we hope our cars will also be able to predict how other drivers respond to a beep in different situations."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
