As I touched on very briefly in my post about the Google X Lab, Google has been designing, developing, and recently even testing a driverless car. The car is designed to actually be able to sense other cars on the road, turns, signs, and other important factors and drive itself, with human supervision. Google's self-driving Toyota Prius actually went through even more testing last month. It was able to successfully drive a blind man to a local Taco Bell. There were of course supervisors from Google present, making sure everything went smoothly and there were no major problems.
This is obviously a huge step in the development of these cars. I don't doubt at all that after enough designing and testing, Google would be able to successfully create a reliable driverless car. What I think would take longer would be to gain society's acceptance. I highly doubt that people would just accept that a driverless car has been invented and trust it to take them from A to B. With the exponential growth of technology, it sometimes takes a while for society to trust it. I imagine people would be extremely skeptical, and some would even completely refuse to trust it. I imagine they would originally be used for people with handicaps although most likely end up as a consumer project. It seems Google is making legitimate steps towards this completed product so it will be very interesting to follow the progress.
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