Google has been working on its Self-Driving Car Project for quite some time now. The Mountain View based giant had unveiled its first prototype of the driverless car in May this year. Now as a Christmas gift to all the auto enthusiasts out there, Google has presented a fully functioning prototype of the self-driving car on December 22.
According to Google, the prototype which it had unveiled in May was just a mock-up that had no steering wheel or pedals and not even real headlights. Since then the company has developed several different prototypes to test various systems of the car. After a lot of experimentation and testing, Google has finally built a fully functional self-driving car that is now ready to be tried out on a test track.
According to AutoBlog, the new prototype has a steering wheel as well as gas and brake pedals which are mandatory according to the laws for self-driving cars in the state of California. For safety purposes, the car speed maxes out at 25 miles per hour.
This is Google’s first complete prototype based on autonomous driving technology. Google has been developing this technology for several years and had been testing it on cars of other automakers. Recent testing has been done on Lexus SUVs running on California freeways and clocking almost 1 million miles.
Google says that it will be testing out the new self-driving car prototype for some more time on the test track and it will be ready to hit the North California streets in 2015.
You can watch the video of the test drive here:
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