Google (GOOG) Unveils First Fully-Autonomous Car

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) unveiled its first fully autonomous car prototype this week.

Speaking at a Re/code conference, Google co-founder Sergey Brin talked about the vehicle, saying speed would be capped at 25 mph for now. The cars are expected to start showing up around Southern California in the next few years.

Director of Google's self-driving vehicle project, Chris Urmson, also commented in a blog post, We're planning to build about a hundred prototype vehicles, and later this summer, our safety drivers will start testing early versions of these vehicles that have manual controls ... If all goes well, we'd like to run a small pilot program here in California in the next couple of years.

Re/code also asked Urmson, But what happens if you’re riding in a self-driving car with no steering wheel or brakes, and something goes wrong?

Urmson said, In a normal car there’s power steering and power brakes, and if the power steering fails, as a strong person you can use your muscles as a fallback to still steer the vehicle. In our car there is no steering wheel so we have to design really fundamental capabilities. So we have effectively two motors and they work so if one of them fails the other can steer, so the car can always control where it’s going, and similar with brakes.

Below is the initial demo video of the vehicle:

Another video is with Re/code's Kara Swisher and Liz Gomes:

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