I had no idea the technology was this advanced. Last I heard was the DARPA challenge where they were still struggling to navigate traffic-free dirtroads. Google blows mind once again.
So much of the groundwork for what Google is doing today was already in place three years ago thanks to DARPA. Google's contribution, as far as I can tell, has been to pour more funding into the project and contribute its extensive mapping data and its phenomenal capabilities in collecting and crunching huge datasets.
When fully autonomous road transport does finally become a reality, it'll owe as much for its inception to DARPA, with its innovative X-Prize-style Grand Challenges, as it does to Google. And naturally to all the competing teams who over the course of three DARPA challenges drastically advanced the state of the art and overturned previous assumptions about what was believed possible.
This is a fascinating example of academic research, innovative government funding and long-sighted private funding combining to create something really cool and useful. I hope this sort of thing will continue.