Google took another step toward taking self-driving cars mainstream on Thursday, after the company announced that its new prototype vehicles are already cruising the streets of Mountain View, California.
This new breed of car, a two-door pod-shaped vehicle that Google said it built from scratch, was engineered from the ground up to be self-driving.
The company emphasized safety in its announcement: Each self-driving car will have a human driver as backup, a removable steering wheel, and accelerator and brake pedals, which will let drivers take over if needed. In addition, each car will also have a maximum speed of 25 mph.
“They’ll drive using the same software that our existing Lexus vehicles use — the same fleet that has self-driven over 1 million miles since we started the project,” Google wrote in a post.
The company’s latest cars also sport sensors capable of detecting nearby objects that are small (and shifty), including plastic shopping bags and “rogue birds,” as far away as two football fields.
Google started testing self-driving cars in 2009, when it put on California roads several conventional Toyota Priuses, which were outfitted with customized software and hardware, followed by modified Lexus SUVs.
In May, the company announced that it would deploy its own custom-designed self-driving cars on Mountain View streets by the summer, which it did.
It’s all part of Google’s ambitious strategy to get self-driving cars ready for mass production by 2020, a plan that reportedly included discussions with big-name automakers, such as Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen.
Getting there will also involve significantly reducing costs, given that at least one of the sensors used currently costs a whopping $70,000 each.
Source: Mashable