Self-Driving Cars

[Anchor Lead]

The development of self-driving cars is in full swing worldwide. Korea's cutting-edge driverless car, developed by Seoul National University, has made the country’s first attempt at city driving.

[Pkg]

A car effortlessly drives down a street in Yeouido, Seoul. It changes lanes with ease to make a right turn. It even slows down when it sees a stopped bus ahead. It looks like an ordinary sedan, but it is the SNUver, a self-driving vehicle developed by a Seoul National University research team.

[Soundbite] Kye Dong-kyoung(Intelligent Vehicle IT Research Center, SNU) : "The camera can see 360°so it can view the cars behind it or a bus passing by. There is no blind spot."

Until now it has been driven only inside the school campus, but it has come out to be tested on real city streets for the first time. It took the SNUver 15 minutes to travel 4 kilometers, at the speed of 50 kilometers per hour. The test ended without a glitch. The United States has been testing driverless vehicles on ordinary roads since the early 2000s, but the Korean government had permitted test-driving on city streets just last year. Experts say that Korea's self-driving technology lags about 9 years behind that of Google's.

[Soundbite] Prof. Seo Seung-woo(Intelligent Vehicle IT Research Center, SNU) : "Self-driving technology is divided into five levels. The SNUver is level 4, while other similar vehicles produced in Korea are level 3."

The research team plans to repeat test drives in the Yeouido area until the year's end so that it can develop a technology that enables the SNUver to respond appropriately to various situations while driving on the road.