It's small. It's cute. It's from Google. It can drive itself.
And it's absolutely terrifying to everyone in the auto industry.
The Google Car might not look like much, but its existence as an actual production vehicle has auto executives waking up in a cold sweat.
At the moment, the Google Car is in the testing phase.
But in the middle of last year, it was in the prototype phase.
In six short months, Google fires up an assembly line and started constructing a version that can drive itself on public roads (as long as an authorized Google employee is at the wheel - and yes, the Google Car now has a steering wheel, something the prototype lacked).
This means that Google is a car company.
A car company that's developed the most radical idea about transportation since the car replaced the horse.
A tiny, slow, self-driving podmobile isn't itself a direct or immediate threat to companies that now build large, fast, expensive SUVs driven by humans.
