The company hopes to partner with one or more carmakers to license the technology

Apr 26, 2012 14:51 GMT  ·  By

Google's self-driving car may sound like SF, even though they're very real, but they're coming to a street near you much sooner than you'd think, within a decade Google hopes.

Talking to the WSJ, Google's Anthony Levandowski who leads the project, is very hopeful.

He says Google is already talking to car makers, all carmakers about integrating the technology in one form or another.

While Google may be great at building software and hardware, cars aren't exactly its specialty.

It does have several options for the self-driving technology though, a partnership with car makers, offering the hardware as an aftermarket kit that people can install on their own, or even giving away the technology for free, like it's done in the past, with Android for example.

The most obvious choice though is to partner with a car maker. That sounds easier than it is, carmakers don't really like an outside company, like Google, to come and "boss" them around.

That said, Google already has several partnerships with carmakers that use its Maps and navigation technology. Audi's top-of-the-line A8 comes with Google Maps, Street View and Google Earth built in, Mercedes also offers Google Maps and Street View as an option on some models.

But Maps is one thing, a technology that takes over the car entirely is quite another. It's not just car makers that Google has to deal with, it's also talking to insurers to come up with a way of offering insurance on these cars. There's also the legislative aspect to take into account.

Despite Google's optimism, there's still plenty of work to do, even if everything else were perfect, the technology is still not ready for mass consumption, Google still needs to do millions of miles of testing. It's gotten to about 200,000 miles in the few years it's been working on it.