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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Not so boring?

This month, I stirred up the blogosphere when I wrote that my brief ride in a Google self-driving Lexus with two other reporters was “boring.”

There was a lot of breathless coverage of Google’s press event, which culminated with the company’s piling reporters three at a time into the back seat of a sensor-full autonomous vehicle for a five-mile jaunt through traffic in the Silicon Valley community where the company has its headquarters.

To me, what was striking at the time — aside from being cramped in the back seat — was the seemingly routine nature of autonomous driving, based on Internet-connected navigation technology that Google has been working on for more than four years.

Yet despite an optimistic report that Google gave to the reporters at the event, held at the Computer History Museum on May 13, the company revealed on Tuesday that more than a year ago Google engineers had decided that they would not be able to meet their safety goals in modified conventional automobiles that require humans to take back control in emergency situations.

So, while continuing to test its fleet of Lexuses — which now require two co-pilots — in both city street and freeway driving, last year Google secretly embarked on a new strategy to find a way to automate personal transportation completely in urban settings. The company is now turning attention to designing a new kind of car that can be safe enough that the driver can be taken entirely out of the loop.

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As a result, it has decided to design its own vehicles from the ground up, with only passenger seats and no driver.

This is a radical bet that by creating a sensor-based virtual safety “bubble” around a vehicle that travels at relatively low speeds and has a 360-degree field of view offered by a variety of sensors, the company will be able to build a car that doesn’t crash.

Last Thursday, along with a roboticist, Christopher Urmson, the leader of the Google car project, I was driven — again in the back seat by an self-driving Lexus — to a secluded parking lot several blocks from Google’s sprawling campus.

For the demonstration, the parking lot was surrounded with Google security guards, making certain that no passers-by would be able to catch a glimpse of the next-generation Google car. Once we arrived, Dr. Urmson pulled out his smartphone and used it to “summon” the car, which drove up to us, stopped and announced its presence.

We climbed in and put on our seat belts, and then he told me I could start our ride by pressing the button on the console that was placed between the two passenger seats. (There was also a bright red “e-stop” button, which is required in autonomous vehicles, on the console.) There was a moment of anxiety while we waited for the light on the “go” button to turn green, but it finally did, and off the car went.

We took a couple of circuitous — and uneventful — laps through the parking lot.

The experience was different in some ways from my earlier autonomous vehicle experience. It was a cross between riding in my office elevator (the elevator to reach the San Francisco bureau of The New York Times has buttons to select floors; the elevators in the Times Building in New York are more disconcerting — the buttons are located outside, on each floor — but that’s another story) and memories of riding in the Disneyland Tomorrowland people mover as a child.

The passenger compartment has room for just two seats, lots of legroom and, in place of the normal automobile dashboard, a small storage area for things like groceries. Below the plastic windshield — the idea is that such a material would cushion the blow should something go wrong and the car hits a pedestrian — is a horizontal flat-panel display. During our ride it showed the time, the local temperature and a projection on the time remaining until we were scheduled to end our trip, but you could easily see how it might also allow you to do Google searches or read Gmail on your ride.

Although both Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder involved in the project, and Dr. Urmson were coy about what the search engine company wants to do with its self-driving cars, I think the answer is now clear. And it is stunning.

After demonstrating the car, Google ferried me back to campus to interview Mr. Brin.

“It does really feel different,” he said. “Once you take the steering wheel and the pedals out of the vehicle, it’s different to the passenger, it’s different to the software engineer, it’s a different deal. It’s a pretty big discontinuity.”

When asked directly about what he thought the business might be, Mr. Brin pointed to ending the connection between transportation and vehicle ownership.

“Regardless of Google, I think the right model for most of the world will be not through vehicle ownership,” he said. “These should be provided as services for the most part.”

He added: “The fact is that we have the technology to deliver and it’s likely we’re going to have a lot of partners who might be automakers, parts suppliers, service providers, cities and countries.”

He said that a clear decision had not already been made, and that it might be different for different parts of the world.

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But what about moving goods? Amazon, of course, drew a great deal of attention recently when it claimed it was exploring the use of drones to deliver products.

What about Google robot cars for delivering goods? I asked Mr. Brin this question. On my way to my interview, driving between Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto and Google’s Mountain View campus, I had passed by four Google Shopping Express vehicles.

“I’d be open to it,” he responded. “The problem with the Google Express stuff is there is still the dude who gets out and puts stuff on the porch.”

At the same time, he acknowledged that Google had recently bought at least nine robotics companies, and Andy Rubin, who created the company’s Android phone business, is hard at work experimenting with walking robots, among other challenges.

So maybe the Google car that will drive up to your house so that a Google robot can deliver your packages isn’t an absolute fantasy.

But is it a “moonshot,” as Mr. Brin likes to call Google’s projects? You bet.