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Google Self-Driving Car Prototype (Firefly)

Google Self-Driving Car Prototype (Firefly)

Image creditJonathan Deamer
CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗

Google Self-Driving Car Prototype (Firefly)

Year
2014
Creator
Google self-driving car project (later Waymo)
Company
Google / Waymo
Location
Mountain View, California; on display at the Computer History Museum

Description

This small two-seat electric car has a sensor dome on its roof and no steering wheel or pedals. Google showed the design in May 2014 and limited its top speed to 25 mph.

Importance

Google designed the Firefly from the start as a fully self-driving car, so it had no controls for a human driver. On October 20, 2015, a Firefly carried Steve Mahan, who is legally blind, through a neighborhood in Austin with no controls or human backup. In 2017, Waymo, the former Google project, retired the Firefly fleet and moved to self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans.

Interesting fact

Neighbors called the rounded car the koala car or the gumdrop, and workers in Michigan built each Firefly by hand.

Sources

  1. From post-it note to prototype: The journey of our Firefly ↗Waymo · 2017-06-12
  2. Google's Self-Driving Car Prototype Ready to Hit the Road ↗IEEE Spectrum · 2014-12-30
  3. A Panic Button and No Steering Wheel: A Look at Google's First Self-Driving Car ↗NBC News · 2014-05