Tech giant Google announced today that its prototype driverless vehicles will be on the roads in Mountain View, California this summer. The prototype vehicles' speed will be capped at 25mph, and will all be equipped with a safety driver, capable of taking the reigns if necessary.

Google Self-Driving Cars to Hit the Road in California this Summer

Jason Doiy/iStock

Tech giant Google announced today that its prototype driverless vehicles will be on the roads in Mountain View, California this summer. The prototype vehicles' speed will be capped at 25mph, and will all be equipped with a safety driver, capable of taking the reigns if necessary.

This new fleet will utilize the same software as Google's existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs, which have logged nearly 1,000,000 miles of automated driving. In its statement, Google says that it is "looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles".

When we started designing the world’s first fully self-driving vehicle, our goal was a vehicle that could shoulder the entire burden of driving. Vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button could transform mobility for millions of people, whether by reducing the 94 percent of accidents caused by human error (PDF), reclaiming the billions of hours wasted in traffic, or bringing everyday destinations and new opportunities within reach of those who might otherwise be excluded by their inability to drive a car. 

Now we’re announcing the next step for our project: this summer, a few of the prototype vehicles we’ve created will leave the test track and hit the familiar roads of Mountain View, Calif., with our safety drivers aboard.

We’ve been running the vehicles through rigorous testing at our test facilities, and ensuring our software and sensors work as they’re supposed to on this new vehicle. The new prototypes will drive with the same software that our existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs uses. That fleet has logged nearly a million autonomous miles on the roads since we started the project, and recently has been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week. So the new prototypes already have lots of experience to draw on—in fact, it’s the equivalent of about 75 years of typical American adult driving experience

Each prototype’s speed is capped at a neighborhood-friendly 25mph, and during this next phase of our project we’ll have safety drivers aboard with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal that allow them to take over driving if needed. We’re looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles, and to uncovering challenges that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle—e.g., where it should stop if it can’t stop at its exact destination due to construction or congestion. In the coming years, we’d like to run small pilot programs with our prototypes to learn what people would like to do with vehicles like this. If you’d like to follow updates about the project and share your thoughts, please join us on our Google+ page. See you on the road!