The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.My first thought was where they got the technology. Turns out they hired (or already employed) the Stanford engineers that won the second DARPA Grand Challenge.
My second thought: what's the end game? Making cars safer is great, but "the Google researchers said the company did not yet have a clear plan to create a business from the experiments."