Google Self-Driving Prototype On The Road Within Months

Google announced today they are going to put their small pod-like self-driving cars on the road as soon as this summer. The cars, unveiled in an event last spring, offered test rides for a select group of riders in California. Now, after a week of self-driving accident talk, Google has announced that some of their prototypes will leave the proving ground and make their way onto the streets of Mountain View, CA.

The decision on the part of Google to let their prototypes loose is a result of what they have reported to be lots of experience. In an official Google blog posting, they declared that self-driving prototypes are ready for roads because they’ve logged lots of miles in their RX-450h SUVS. They equated the amount of miles traveled in the Lexus vehicles to be comparable to 75 years of “typical American adult driving experience.” The new Google Cars use the same software as the Lexus models. The company feels that they can apply learning from the Lexus experience to the new prototypes.

The vehicles have a capped top speed of 25 miles per hour. The vehicles won’t fly solo. They will have a “safety driver” aboard incase there is a need for a human to make a correction or take other necessary vehicular actions. Chris Urmson, the director of the Google self-driving car project spoke about this project in a press release.

Urmson wrote, “We’re looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles, and to uncovering challenges that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle—e.g., where it should stop if it can’t stop at its exact destination due to construction or congestion.”

Certainly some of what Urmson is talking about will help the trust of self-driving cars, which was under scrutiny this week. Google reported that their self-driving cars have been involved in 11 accidents total during 1.7 million miles of travel. In general people don’t see trust self-driving cars just yet. Concerns over how self-driving cars would handle slick roads, who is at fault when they are in an accident and what would happen during a computer malfunction are still concerns without an answer.