No, wait, it's... a puffy chunk of foam insulation! "The laser almost certainly got returns off of it," says Chris Urmson, sitting behind the wheel of the Prius he is not driving. A note is made (FOD: foreign object or debris, lane 1) as we drive past, to help our computerized car understand the curious flotsam it has just seen. It's a Monday, midday, and we are heading north on California Highway 85 in a Google autonomous vehicle. In October 2010, when The New York Times reported that Google had built a fleet of self-driving cars that had already collectively traversed some 140,000 miles of California asphalt, it came as a shock, a terrestrial Sputnik.
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