By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
Google announced Monday it has built its first fully-functioning driverless car.
The tech giant has been working on self-driving vehicles for several years by implanting software into existing cars but it celebrated Monday with the release of pictures and the announcement of its first autonomous vehicle built from scratch.
The finished two-door prototype looks somewhat like a golf cart built with a whimsical flair.
Google released in May a mockup of the car that wasn’t road-ready – it lacked headlights, for example. The vehicle caused a stir because it didn’t include features normally used by human drivers such as a steering wheel, brake pedals and rearview mirrors.
Since that time Google’s team has been testing various programming in different models.
“We’ve been working on different prototypes-of-prototypes, each designed to test different systems of a self-driving car,” wrote the Google Self-Driving Car Project team in a Google+ post published Monday.
The vehicle is the first one that marries the automobile functionality and software engineering into one working car.
“We’ve now put all those systems together in this fully functional vehicle – our first complete prototype for fully autonomous driving,” the team continued.
The company will be testing the car on northern California streets in 2015. Google has already logged hundreds of thousands of miles driving autonomous vehicles around its hometown of Mountain View, California, but not with homemade cars.
Now its new quirky car will be joining the fleet. Even though Google has tossed normal features such as the steering wheel, testers will be able to take over the controls.
“Our safety drivers will continue to oversee the vehicle for a while longer, using temporary manual controls as needed while we continue to test and learn,” the team wrote.
While Google’s car is strikingly different than anything on the market, Monday’s announcement marks an exciting new page in the automobile’s history.
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