Self-driving Car Coming to a road near you, as google advances public road tests

Google Sends Autonomous Prototype Cars Onto Public Roads

Chris Urmson, right, the head of Google's self-driving car project,
shows the product to U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx,
 left, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt at the company's headquarters
in Mountain View, Calif. (Credit: via Industry Week).

A report credit to AFP said Google has moved a step closer to rolling out its self-driving cars unto public roads. According to the Industry Week, Google’s self-driving prototype cars have taken to streets in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, as Google announced Thursday.

A Google executive was quoted as saying "We want to understand what it really means to have a self-driving vehicles in the world - both how people in the community perceive and interact with them, and what the practical realities are for us in operating and maintaining them.`

The move comes after Google’s internal testing of the bubble-shaped vehicle over the past year and more extensive experience with technology adapted for existing cars.

“We want to understand what it really means to have self-driving vehicles in the world — both how people in the community perceive and interact with them, and what the practical realities are for us in operating and maintaining them,” Google said in a released statement.

Prototype cars built from the ground up to get around safely without human drivers join Google’s fleet of Lexus vehicles augmented with sensors and other computing gadgetry to manage autonomously on roads.

It means that since Royal Greenwich is one of approved test boroughs in the UK, residents might be right to look out for the new google cars.