Where is Google's car going?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Leave any building at Google Inc.'s headquarters here, and you will find dozens of bicycles, all painted an off-kilter mix of yellow, green, blue and red to match Google's logo.

Employees use them to get across Google's campus without driving. They eventually may have another option: one of Google's experimental self-driving cars.

In the five years since revealing its work on autonomous driving, Google has given few hints about how it plans to let ordinary people use the technology. But according to Chris Urmson, the former Carnegie Mellon University researcher who leads the project, Google is thinking of offering its self-driving cars as shuttles for Google employees or as a public service for the whole city of Mountain View.

"We don't know whether it would be Mountain View or somewhere else," Urmson said in an interview last month at Google's headquarters. "But some kind of test like that would make an awful lot of sense."

With its dream of self-driving shuttles for public use, Google is diverging more sharply than ever before from automakers, which intend to gradually roll out autonomous-driving features in personal cars while keeping the driver in control.

BMW and Mercedes-Benz will outline their own visions this week at the International CES in Las Vegas, the world's largest consumer electronics convention. Dieter Zetsche, CEO of Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG, plans to give an update on the company's autonomous-driving research during a speech today, Jan. 5, as a follow-up to his splashy 2013 appearance at the Frankfurt auto show, for which he emerged from an S-class sedan that had driven itself onto the stage.

Google started its experiment in 2009 with a modified version of the Toyota Prius, followed by a modified Lexus RX 450h. But a rounded, bug-eyed prototype it unveiled last May signaled a shift in focus to urban driving.

"We were trying to think about something that would fit into a community," Urmson said. "Something that was friendly and approachable, something you wouldn't mind being in your neighborhood."

Roughly the size of a Fiat 500 or a Smart ForTwo, the as-yet-unnamed prototype has a gray face similar to a koala's and can operate without a steering wheel or pedals. Testing on public roads is slated to begin this year, though the cars will need to have a steering wheel and pedals for emergencies to satisfy California regulations.

As it developed the new prototype, Google stepped up work on mapping its hometown of Mountain View, a 12-square-mile city between San Francisco and San Jose with a population of about 74,000.

Urmson said Google now has mapped every road in the city and driven all of them in autonomous mode, with some chaos thrown in for good measure.

Google's famous Internet search engine has a button that says "I'm Feeling Lucky." If users click that button, they go straight to the first website from their search results, rather than seeing a full list.

Testers of Google's self-driving car get the same option. With the click of a button, their car will choose a random destination along Mountain View's street grid and navigate there, like a taxi driver who knows the entire city.

"I live in Mountain View, and I've been here six years, but I tell it to go somewhere random, and invariably, I find myself on some street I've never been on," Urmson said. Urmson said the car has encountered things it might not otherwise have seen, such as piled-up leaves, stray garbage cans and, in one case, a woman in a wheelchair chasing a duck while wielding a broom.

"We would not have had a woman in a wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom as a test case," Urmson said. "Fortunately, the vehicle did fine."

Autonomous shuttles would bring Google a step closer to a potential business model: offering customers the ability to summon a car from a smartphone and ride to a destination -- like a high-tech, yet cheaper version of today's Uber and Lyft.

"The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car. You're paying for the other dude in the car," Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was quoted as saying at a conference in May. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle."

Google has a lot of work to do first. Urmson said the company won't roll out self-driving cars for public use until they are significantly safer than human-piloted cars -- and right now, he said, they aren't.

Google's cars have logged more than 700,000 miles in autonomous mode without an accident, but those miles were driven with a test driver ready to take control at the first sign of danger.

To underscore the urgency of the task at hand, Urmson has set a goal of rolling out the technology by the time the older of his sons, ages 11 and 9, starts driving.

He can imagine how useful it could be for his one-car household. One morning in December, Urmson's wife took the car because one of their sons had a doctor's appointment. Urmson was going to accompany his other son to school on their bicycles, but it was pouring rain, so they got a ride through Uber.

If Google already had started offering self-driving shuttles in the city of Mountain View, Urmson said, he would have summoned one.