Google's self-driving cars hit the road

PanARMENIAN.Net - If you live in the Mountain View area of California, there's an outside chance you may have noticed small, pod-like vehicles crawling along its roads, Digital Spy reports.

This is nothing to be alarmed about - it's just Google road testing its prototype driverless cars, which travel no faster than 25mph in their current form.

Google's test vehicles have a human driver on standby and are equipped with manual controls to avoid falling foul of California road laws.

"These prototype vehicles are designed from the ground up to be fully self-driving," the firm explained via a Google+ post.

"They're ultimately designed to work without a steering wheel or pedals, but during this phase of our project we'll have safety drivers aboard with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal."

Self-driving car trials have been held in Britain at Greenwich, Bristol, Milton Keynes and Coventry as part of a government-backed initiative to assess the possibilities and pitfalls of the technology, but they are yet to hit the roads across the Atlantic.