Residents of Mountain View, CA are in for a treat with word from Google early Friday that their self-driving Google cars are graduating from the Googleplex and are migrating into the surrounding streets.

In a post to the Official Google Blog Chris Urmson, the Director of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project explained that “a few of the prototype vehicles we’ve created will leave the test track and hit the familiar roads of Mountain View, Calif., with our safety drivers aboard.”

Each car will be speed limited to 25 mph (40 km/h) in what is described as a “neighborhood-friendly” speed and the cars will include a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal that allow the safety drivers to take over driving if needed.

“We’re looking forward to learning how the community perceives and interacts with the vehicles, and to uncovering challenges that are unique to a fully self-driving vehicle” Urmson added.

Google first revealed its first “real build” prototype working version of its autonomous self-driving vehicle back in December 2014.

The car is the first fully functional self-driving car designed from the ground up by Google, and has undergone extensive testing at their testing facilities, in a process described as being to ensure that the software and sensors work as they’re supposed to.

The software the prototypes are running on is the same as that on Google’s existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs, a fleet that has logged nearly a million autonomous miles (1.6 million kms) on public roads since they started the project and have more recently been self-driving about 10,000 miles a week.

What form the future?

Since Google originally announced its self-driving car program the technology has come a long way. 2015 model Tesla’s, for example, have becoming semi-autonomous, and new vehicles in the pipeline from the likes of General Motors and BMW offer close to autonomous driving.

Part of the exercise for the Google car was to actually build an electric car from the ground up, no mean feat even for the likes of Google, but the question arises: does this form factor and design foretell of the form cars take in the future? Will we see cars that look like something out of a Japanese comic book in fleets around city streets providing a Uber like service, something Google is reported to be considering?

Whether Google’s car is the future or not, one thing is for sure: many are looking forward to finding out.