Several weeks after Uber rolled out UberPool in New York, Google announced its first functioning prototype from its famous self-driving car project. The tiny two-seater vehicle looks like a Koala bear merged with a marshmallow — adorable, but also completely different from anything you’ve seen on the road to date.
With a top speed near 25 MPH, it’s designed for city living, not road trips, but extensive testing with earlier technology suggests that Google autonomous driving technology is significantly safer than human drivers, particularly at highway speeds. Google expects to be testing the prototype on Northern California streets in early 2015.
Finally, in the last days of 2014, the electric car company Tesla announced that a new upgrade for its pricey Roadster sportscar would extend the car’s range on a single battery charge to 400 miles, for the first time exceeding the average range of many gas-powered cars. (Acting more like a software company than a traditional automobile manufacturer, Tesla is offering a significant upgrade to a car that it stopped producing in 2011.)
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