Patent published on August 22, 2014

The Google Driverless Car Can Diagnose itself on Its Own

I know you have gotten a little bit confused after reading the title. But before you start feeling that I tricked you by writing a click bait headline, I must make it clear now only: No, I didn’t trick you. This is what will be happening but another way around.

So stay with me for the next 300 words. I appreciate your patience in this rather impatience worlds. Here I go, Sir:

I’m assuming that you already know how Google personalizes your search results. But for the uninitiated readers I would love to make an effort to explain –to set the context. You can scroll the next two paragraphs just in case you are in hurry!

So what happens is that Google uses a browser cookie to watch what you click on a search result page. This helps it learn which websites you favor over other. For example, let say you are from Cornell University and you frequently read news articles about university’s sports team on Cornellbigred.com.

So, if you write Big Red on the search box, Google returns Cornellbigred.com as top results for you rather than Big Red soft drink. Cool! Isn’t it? And Google will be doing the same when you will drive a car.

In the future, you may find driverless car computer by Google living inside your car. In one of an old article, I discussed how a driverless car computer asks you to log-in to verify your identity.

After you log-in, like your search engine, it starts watching your driving setting. It notices which channel you play on the radio, which temperature you generally prefer, steering wheel and pedal position, lighting preferences – whether you keep internal lights on or off, child lock, whether you prefer half rolled window, and things like that.

It monitors these preferences over a period of time and stores these settings along with your profile. So no matter whom car you will be driving, as soon as you log-in to the car computer, it will personalize everything as per your need.

From where I found this information? Well, like always, from a patent application by Google. Here is the link to the application: 20170232914

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