Google’s self-driving cars hit public streets for 1st time

Google’s new self-driving vehicles have been tested on public roads for the first time in the US state of California, where the search giant is based.

Google announced on Thursday that the cars "are ready for the road and a few of them are now cruising around" the city of Mountain View.

The cars are totally built by Google and are different from the heavily-modified Lexus vehicles the company already has.

For the past year, Google has been testing its own bubble-shaped vehicle and experimenting on it using technology adapted for existing cars.

"We've had 20-plus Lexus vehicles driving on Mountain View city streets for the last few years, but the arrival of our new self-driving vehicle prototypes marks the start of a new phase of our project," Google said, assuring the US public that its prototypes will have "safety drivers" who can take over using manual controls if needed.

“The prototypes’ speed is capped at a neighborhood-friendly 25mph, and they’ll drive using the same software that our existing Lexus vehicles use — the same fleet that has self-driven over one million miles since we started the project. As we start to cruise around the neighborhood, we really want to hear what our neighbors think,” the company added.

Google has defended the safety record of the new cars, saying that they were not at fault in any of the dozen or so accidents they have been involved in.

According to the company, most of the collisions involved the self-driving cars being hit in the rear by vehicles driven by other people.

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