1st Real Google Self-Driving Car Arrives

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Originally published on Sustainnovate.

Google introduced its own, built-from-the-ground-up, electric self-driving cars earlier this year. This has got to be one of the biggest tech stories of the year. However, at that launch, the self-driving mockup vehicle, as Google noted in a Google+ post today, “didn’t even have real headlights!” It has surely made a lot of progress since then, as the announcement today was that the “first real build” of the cute little electric vehicle has arrived.

Briefly summarizing what has gone on since May, the Google+ post states: “Since then, we’ve been working on different prototypes-of-prototypes, each designed to test different systems of a self-driving car—for example, the typical ‘car’ parts like steering and braking, as well as the ‘self-driving’ parts like the computer and sensors. We’ve now put all those systems together in this fully functional vehicle—our first complete prototype for fully autonomous driving.”

The Google+ post went on to note that people in Northern California would be able to spot the self-driving car on public streets in 2015. For now, the team behind the self-driving car is “spending the holidays zipping around our test track.”

It’s great to see the vehicle moving forward, and I think it looks pretty sharp now with the real headlights.

Here’s a video from May in case you missed it:

Image Credit: Google