Google to Test on Road its first complete Self-Driving Car Prototype

Google’s first complete Self-Driving Car Prototype revealed

It seems like Google is all set to enjoy its Christmas with the best holiday gift. On Monday, Google announced its self-driving car’s first completed prototype that is ready for testing on road.

The Google self-driving team in a Google+ post said they are in plans to put the car prototype through several paces of test tracking all along the holidays hoping to see the car rolling on the streets of Northern California, the New Year.

The current revealed prototype though looks the same to what was earlier shown by Google last May, this seems to be fully functional where as the earlier one was just a model like mockup of the original. If recalled it can be learnt that the earlier one didn’t even have real headlights, it just had fake headlight stickers on it to get the look with huge exposed roof sensor.

But the prototype revealed by the Internet giant on Monday is a manifestation of the California-based Google’s plans of the one it revealed last May. All that Google plans with its self-driving car is to have an autonomous car of its own that doesn’t need typical features like a steering wheel and so on.

Chris Urmson of Google in his blog post said the Google Car with no steering wheel, accelerator pedal or brake pedal and many more doesn’t actually need them. The car’s sensors and software do all that is required, he added.

Google had to build several prototypes to reach out to the end result that is showed now. From the initial prototype till data, Google’s self-driving car team has been testing out each prototype to analyze on the different functionality of the car. Now the end prototype that got revealed on Monday is a complete vehicle with refined real looks and functional components.

According to Google as said earlier this year, the high speed of the battery-powered prototypes will be 40 kilometers (25 miles) per hour and that they are meant for utility and not for luxury.

Different prototypes-of-prototypes made have been tested by Google to finalize on its different functionalities that included the typical car parts like its brakes, steering and also for the cars software and sensors. Putting together all these systems have ended up with the finalized fully functional vehicle of Google that is shown as its first complete prototype for its fully autonomous driving car.

At this point we can admit that there have been several automakers in the market who are still working on to give semi-autonomous or autonomous features for cars like self-parking and so on but until now no one has worked on giving a fully automated car which Google is doing.

As said by Mike Hudson, the automotive industry tracker for eMarketer, if these Self-driving cars are adopted widely then they might turn out to be a transformative for today’s lifestyle as it happened with the Smartphones.

Nothing was revealed with regards to the technical specifications of the prototype except for the picture that showed a round shaped white color bug like vehicle.

This might not be the finished product as Google is yet to continue with is safety driving tests where safety drivers can manually take over the car’s control using temporary pedal systems and steering wheels. Of course the end product is to run without any driver input but in reality it might take several years.

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