Google's self-driven cars have been making strides over the years and mapping cities as they drive around without any passengers. The cars come packed with a lot of technology - lasers, cameras, radar and GPS - to make them function without a human driver present.
The project continues to gain momentum as Google may be working with auto makers on releasing these cars onto the public in the future. Although this idea is still at the concept stages of production.
"We are thinking now about how to bring this car to market," says Chris Urmson, project director. "There will be a time when a significant number of cars will carry Google technology."
However, he added that the concept is about six years away from happening and that Google is still trying to figure out how to market such a concept or make it happen.
Google has not yet decided whether to design its own car for the market or simply focus on the software and OS for other auto makers to utilize (think Android but with cars instead of mobile devices).
The six-year timeline is a bit optimistic to many industry insiders or those know how technology in the auto industry works.
A self-driving car that only has six years to get ready for market production would be "limited in terms of capability, availability, or geography," said Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research.
Google's car was a project that started in 2009 and came out of Google X lab, where succeeding inventions such as the Google Glass also emerged from. The cars use multiple sensors in order to map data in real time.
There are signs that the project is in a new phase with this effort to bring it to mass market. A Google executive by the name of Clare Hughes Johnson, who lately became part of Google X, shared some of her insight on the Google Car project.
She is working on strategies to commercialize the initiative, she says as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The cars are expensive to manufacture due to all of the technologies they leverage.
For instance, only about 150 lasers produced by a company called Velodyne are used in the cars that significantly mark up the production prices of these vehicles. However, it is only due to the limited production of the components and not the parts themselves that make them expensive.
"Our vehicles are expensive today, but none of the components are inherently expensive," Urmson said. "We don't see anything fundamental about the cost."
It remains to be seen how Google creates cars that are appealing enough for a mass market to be marketable and inexpensive enough for their demand to be high. Being able to go around without having control of your own vehicle is something that may take a while getting used to for most people.
