Google’s self-driving cars will hit public roads this year

Google has announced that its self-driving car prototypes will be hitting the public streets this summer. The cars will be found driving around the roads of Mountain View, California, where Google's HQ is based. No exact dates have been announced but it should only be a few months away.

The cars will come with safety drivers along with a removable steering wheel in order to keep things safe and offer options should anything go wrong. Writing on the project's blog (Via: Trusted Reviews), Chris Urmson said: “his summer, a few of the prototype vehicles we’ve created will leave the test track and hit the familiar roads of Mountain View, Calif., with our safety drivers aboard.”

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“The new prototypes will drive with the same software that our existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs uses. That fleet has logged nearly a million autonomous miles on the roads since we started the project, and recently has been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week. So the new prototypes already have lots of experience to draw on—in fact, it’s the equivalent of about 75 years of typical American adult driving experience.”

The current prototypes that will be driving around in public will be capped at 25 miles per hour as a safety measure. These public tests are in place to see how people react to driving around next to self-driving cars.

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KitGuru Says: Google has been working on self-driving cars for a while now. It will be interesting to see how people feel about them when they are driving around public streets. 

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