A self-driving car project started by Google seven years ago has been identified as Waymo, a plan to bring robot-controlled vehicles to the masses within the next five years.
"We are getting close and we are getting ready," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said on Tuesday after unveiling the company's identity.
To underscore his point, Krafcik revealed the project had hit a key milestone in the journey to having fully autonomous cars cruising around public roads.
A pod-like car with no steering wheel and brake pads drove a legally blind passenger around neighbourhoods in Austin, Texas without another person in the car in October last year.
The trip marked the first time one of the project's cars had given a passenger a ride without a human on hand to take control of a self-driving car if something went wrong.
Krafcik and other supporters of self-driving cars believe the technology will drastically reduce the number of deaths on the roads each year because they contend robots don't get distracted or drunk, nor ignore the rules of the road.
While Google's self-driving cars were still in the research-and-development stage, its leaders indicated the vehicles would be commonplace by 2020.
Krafcik declined to update the timetable on Tuesday, saying only that "we are close to bringing this to a lot of people."
Google began working on its self-driving technology in 2009 in a secretive lab called "X" run by company co-founder Sergey Brin.
Since then, its fleet of cars has covered more than 2.3 million miles in the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Arizona and Washington state.
