British developers have been creating a new advanced cruise control system call Sentience. Drivers who are willing to turn braking and acceleration over to a computer could save up to 25% off of their annual gasoline costs. The system uses a GPS along with topographical 

information to control the steering and acceleration. If the Driver is alone on the road the car will essentially drive itself needing only the driver to steer the car. David Overton of Ordinance Survey, the U.K. company government agency that provided the map information for the Sentience project said "The car speeds up, slows down at speed humps, and stops at all the junctions without the driver having to intervene, all the driver is has to do is stick the phone on the dash on off you go." System uses a GPS equipped smart phone on the cellular phone network orange. Wireless bluetooth technology connects the phone to the R-cube, which was developed by the Ricardo company. The R-cube controls the acceleration and braking. The maps provided by the Ordinance survey includes speed bumps and school zones. According to www.gizmag.com the Sentience system even knows when lights ahead are going to turn red soon so you don't waste gas accelerating to a stop point. When pulling up to a round about for instance the software tells the car to slow down and once the turn is completed the car accelerates in the most fuel efficient way possible which is way it saves so much on gas usage. In initial tests it has been observed that drivers can save anywhere from 4% to 25% on gas.  The wide variation in numbers come from the difference in cars, from hybrids and those that have gasoline burning engines only, also the drivers style has an effect. For now the sentience system cannot be used completely effectively because it does not have real time information about where other cars in the road re located. An option is to have Sentience installed on every car on the road, then  the car could control itself and would greatly reduce the chance of car collisions. They feel that people driving while using cell phones or the elderly with slower reaction times could really see benefits from the hardware. The earliest that Sentience could be found on a car is not until 2012. I believe the software can be very useful for todays society and aiding with the prevention of car collisions. The problem at this point is that it is a big task to get all the cars on the road equipped with sentience. Though I feel the potential benefit of the software outweighs the hard process of equipping our vehicles with the same software. I can see a day in the future when all the cars on the road are just carrying people completely autonomously.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29865434/

http://www.gizmag.com/sentience-adaptive-intelligent-cruise-control-driverless-car/11223/