Google's self-driving car ready to hit the road

MANILA, Philippines - Google finished building a fully-functioning self-driving car on Monday.

Since early this year, Google engineers have been building mockup cars combined with self-driving technology that could operate without a person at the wheel. Apparently, this was not the first prototype built but it is the first fully-functional and well equipped one.

According to Google's blog:

The vehicle we unveiled in May (goo.gl/qDUtgq) was an early mockup—it didn’t even have real headlights! Since then, we’ve been working on different prototypes-of-prototypes, each designed to test different systems of a self-driving car—for example, the typical “car” parts like steering and braking, as well as the “self-driving” parts like the computer and sensors. We’ve now put all those systems together in this fully functional vehicle—our first complete prototype for fully autonomous driving.

Meanwhile, technical specifics about the prototype were still to be disclosed by the company. Google looks forward to send it for a test drive over the holidays. The company promises to put the car on track in Northern California on 2015.