This is how BBC News represented the story:
Google's purpose-built robot cars have been given the go ahead to drive on public roads and this summer, they will be seen on the roads around Mountain View, California which is where the search giant is based. The cars will have safety drivers on board who can take over if needed, meaning they are not completely autonomous.
The systems engineer in the self-driving project, Jaime Waydo said: "Every moment has been building towards putting these cars on the roads where we can start learning even more from them. Eventually the purpose-built robot vehicles will not have a steering wheel or any other control though detachable versions will be used during the forthcoming road tests. The top speed of the cars will be capped at 25mph (40km/h) during the tests. In preparation for their public debut the cars had been put through a series of demanding reliability and durability tests. Each vehicle has been clocking up thousands of miles each week on the test tracks - some of which resemble Californian highways and streets".
Mixing with real-life traffic will help Google engineers refine the on-board software to cope with many situations the cars have not encountered during testing, said project head Chris Urmson in a blog post.
"Getting these cars out in to the public and allowing people to react to them, allowing us to see them out there, that's a huge deal and most importantly it's the necessary step to getting them to drive themselves," he said.
My Opinion on the news article
It has been represented by BBC news as an important development that has taken a lot of preparation to get it to this stage. I believe that as a society, we are becoming more and more developed regarding our technology and I am very unsure as to what to expect for the future. I feel that this is quite a risky creation and people will be very weary to use self-driving cars but if the correct precautions are taken, it could be quite exciting.
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