Google Self-Driving Car Tests Focus on City Driving Alexei Oreskovic - Reuters
go to original April 29, 2014

The Google self-driving car navigates some common scenarios on city streets near the Googleplex. (Google)

Google Inc said it has begun testing its self-driving cars on city streets, a crucial new phase in its quest to eventually make the technology a standard feature in automobiles.

After several years of testing self-driving cars on freeways, where driving conditions are more predictable, Google in the past year shifted its focus to city street driving, the company said in a post on its official blog on Monday.

Google said it has driven thousands of miles on the streets of Mountain View, California, a small suburban community where the company maintains its headquarters roughly 35 miles South of San Francisco. Google's driverless cars rely on video cameras, radar sensors, lasers and a database of information collected from manually driven cars to help navigation, according to the company.

"A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area," wrote Chris Urmson, the director of Google's self-driving car project in the blog post.

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