As the last year worth of news in autonomous car development has taught us, you can’t always test the self-driving vehicles on the open road. The amount of accidents and run-ins between autonomous vehicles and piloted cars shows us that a lot of the teething may have to happen on closed courses.
Google has one such facility, called Castle after the Castle Air Force Base that previously resided on that property. From what we can see, they tech giant is not taking itself too seriously when it comes to naming the streets of its autonomous proving ground. This image comes courtesy of Backchannel, and it looks like what we’d name streets if we were city planners.
The Castle features names like “Toretto Way” as homage to Dom Toretto from the Fast and the Furious franchise. From there, it is a greatest hits of movie cars as street names, including Ecto Drive, Kitt Rd., Eleanor Ave. There are also some of our favorite movie car actors and characters as names, like McFly Way and McQueen Lane.
They are all cute names, but kind of a bummer to think about at the same time. These streets are named after characters that played great drivers, and cars that we’re meant to be driven. And yet the cars that will be developed on these roads will probably lead to the end of folks taking out an old Challenger or Mustang to relive moments from great movies. The honest names for these streets should probably be things like “Appliance” and “Autopilot.”
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