Google's vehicles will begin public testing this week

Google’s own self-driving car will be soon be ready to be tested on public roads.

Project director Chris Urmson, in a blog post, says that a few of the prototype vehicles will test around Mountain View, California, where Google is based.

Safety drivers will also accompany the cars, which will cap at a modest 25 mph. Unlike Google intends to make the cars look like eventually, these cars will have a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal.

The prototypes that will be hitting the road will be running the same software as used by Google’s self-driving Lexus RX450h fleet, which formed the core of the company’s research before it announced an entirely original car.

According to Google, the cars have logged in a total of almost a million miles on the road, or as Urmson puts it "about 75 years of typical American adult driving experience."

"We're looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles," says Urmson, "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."