The US military has been working on self-driving vehicles of its own for several years now, and earlier this month a video was published showing just what it's like to take a ride in one. The footage was taken from a GoPro placed right above the driver's seat in one of the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate (GUSS) vehicles being tested by the Marines. The ultimate goal is for the military to be able to use GUSS vehicles to lighten the load of soldiers by carrying equipment for them — potentially for multiple days at a time — and to keep soldiers further from harm's way in the process.
This new video comes from a Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory test of the vehicles in Oahu, Hawaii. Unlike Google's self-driving car, the military's has a steering wheel and all of the dials and levers you'd expect to see in a car, important here in case a driver needs to shift it into manual. The video above shows the wheel twisting as the vehicle moves slowly forward, though that low speed may be a matter of the vehicle keeping pace with the soldiers ahead of it rather than a system limitation. Earlier videos of GUSS vehicles show that they're actually capable of going much faster than this new video shows, and — impressively — doing so while off road.