I’ve posted before about Google pushing the near-term limits of what Elon Musk thinks is possible with autonomous vehicles. We’ll see how that turns out, but here’s a description the Verge’s David Pierce of Google’s new steering wheel-less autonomous taxi prototype which will definitely be all over the media and perhaps all over city streets:

“Speaking about self-driving cars last September, Elon Musk preached caution. The man who wants to send us all to space and shuttle us between cities at outrageous speeds told the FT that ‘my opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.’

Somewhere deep inside the secret labs at Google X, Sergey Brin must have read that and smiled. And then climbed into his tiny car — the one with a strange smiley face for a front and a noticeably missing steering wheel — and with a single button press instructed his car to drive him wherever billionaires go to cackle at the short-sightedness of other billionaires.

On Tuesday night, onstage at the Code Conference in California, Brin revealed an entirely new take on a self-driving car, one decidedly more ambitious than anything we’ve seen before. Google’s as-yet-unnamed car isn’t a modified Lexus. It doesn’t just park itself. It’s an entirely autonomous vehicle, with no need for steering wheels or gas pedals or human intervention of any kind. You can’t drive it even if you want to.

The Google Car is fully electric, big enough for two passengers. It’ll only go 25 miles per hour. Your involvement with the car consists of four things: get in, put on your seatbelt, press the Start button, and wait.”