Shut the gate! It’s the self-driving Google car

The Prius accelerates, tyres squealing as it hits the first turn. The car navigates expertly around a course constructed on the vacant top level of a car park in Long Beach, California. Then the camera moves across to reveal that the steering wheel is spinning on its own, between the driver’s fingers. The wheel remains magically out of his grasp as the G-forces throw around the passenger in the drivers seat.

This is a close-up of the kind of robot car that Google first talked about last year, and was reported in the New York Times among other outlets. This demo is appropriately connected with a TED event. This is not only a demonstration that the car works. It’s a geeky expression of robot car machismo.