Self-Driving Car 'Guardian Angels' Will Protect You From Yourself

The driver keeps pressing the accelerator. But a bunch of electronics hacked into the car brings it to a safe stop anyway--the system had already been tracking the pedestrian for some time using lasers and a camera. The vehicle won't budge until the pedestrian is safely out of the way. That (staged) near miss was a test of a prototype vehicle developed by researchers at MIT. They are trying to prove that there's a different way to use robotic vehicles to improve people's lives than the driverless taxi vision espoused by some automakers and tech giants, such as Alphabet and Uber.