to improve safety and that, because the car is constructed with impact-absorbing foam at the front and a plastic windscreen, “it should be far safer than any other car for pedestrians”. The cars, which have been built specially by a company (as yet unnamed) in Detroit, will be used to investigate further how best to make driverless vehicles work. Google will run a pilot programme using the cars, which are not yet for sale. One challenge is creating high-definition scans of the roads and surroundings before the cars can drive along them because they cannot gather and process enough information in real time. So far, there are high-detail maps of about 2,000 miles of California’s roads, but the state has more than 170,000 miles of public roads. Google says it is interested in licensing the technology to traditional vehicle manufacturers once it has refined it sufficiently. Members of the team had been working on the project even before joining Google, for more than a decade. But the prospect of driverless cars replacing human-driven taxis has been the cause of some alarm. “If you get rid of the driver, then they’re unemployed,” said Dennis Conyon, the south- east director for the UK National Taxi Association. “It would have a major impact on the labour force.” London has about 22,000 licensed black cabs and Conyon estimates that the total number of people