“We saw stuff that made us a little nervous,” Christopher Urmson, a former Carnegie Mellon University roboticist who directs the car project at Google, said at the time. The experiment convinced the engineers that it might not be possible to have a human driver quickly snap back to “situational awareness,” the reflexive response required for a person to handle a split-second crisis.
So Google engineers chose another route, taking the human driver completely out of the loop. They created a fleet of cars without brake pedals, accelerators or steering wheels, and designed to travel no faster than 25 miles an hour.