Paul Ingrassia of Reuters went on a test drive of the current iteration of the Google driverless car. The main technical point to still be worked out, obviously, is the challenge of making the robocars react to the unexpected (e.g., highway patrol waving them past an accident scene). That last 5% or so of such obstacles might be more difficult than the other 95%. The cars are programmed to travel up to 10 mph over the limit if cars around it are speeding (to avoid accidents). Google claims it currently has no business plan for the technology and is just focused on trying to perfect it. An excerpt:

“This test drive, in contrast, took place on the placid streets of Mountain View, the Silicon Valley town that houses Google’s headquarters.

The engineers on hand weren’t high-powered ‘car guys’ but soft-spoken Alpha Geeks of the sort that have emerged as the Valley’s dominant species. And there wasn’t any speeding even though, ironically, Google’s engineers have determined that speeding actually is safer than going the speed limit in some circumstances.

‘Thousands and thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year,’ said Dmitri Dolgov, the project’s boyish Russian-born lead software engineer, who now is a U.S. citizen, describing his sense of mission. ‘This could change that.’

Dolgov, who’s 36 years old, confesses that he drives a Subaru instead of a high-horsepower beast. Not once during an hour-long conversation did he utter the words ‘performance,’ ‘horsepower,’ or ‘zero-to-60,’ which are mantras at every other new-car test drive. Instead Dolgov repeatedly invoked ‘autonomy,’ the techie term for cars capable of driving themselves.

Google publicly disclosed its driverless car program in 2010, though it began the previous year. It’s part of the company’s ‘Google X’ division, overseen directly by co-founder

Sergey Brin and devoted to ‘moon shot’ projects by the Internet company, as Dolgov puts it, that might take years, if ever, to bear fruit.

So if there’s a business plan for the driverless car, Google isn’t disclosing it. Dolgov, who recently ‘drove’ one of his autonomous creations the 450 miles (725 km) or so from Silicon Valley to Tahoe and back for a short holiday, simply says his mission is to perfect the technology, after which the business model will fall into place.”