Anyone who has spent a day in Mountain View, Calif., in the past few years has probably spotted a Lexus SUV driving around town that is equipped with Google self-driving tech spinning on its roof.
Now, Google [fortune-stock symbol=”GOOG”] has unleashed a self-driving car—no pedals, steering wheel, but lots of sensors and software—of its own design. And it’s cruising the streets of Mountain View, the company announced today.
Google, which plans to introduce self-driving cars by 2020, isn’t a traditional automaker—and it shows. While most automakers are adding software to conventional mass market cars to enable autonomous driving, Google has designed its self-driving vehicles from the ground up.
The two-seater vehicle looks more like a gumdrop-on-wheels than a car. The cars, which are equipped with the same software used in Google’s previous generation of self-driving Lexus vehicles, are designed to work without a steering wheel or pedals. For now…
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