The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here

"In October 2010 ... Google's fleet of self-driving cars had already collectively traversed some 140,000 miles of California asphalt... Last year, a BMW drove itself down the Autobahn, from Munich to Ingolstadt ... Audi sent an autonomous vehicle up Pikes Peak...n November, Toyota unveiled its Prius AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), which can be summoned remotely. GM’s Alan Taub predicts that self-driving cars will be on the road by the decade’s end... we are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement on a busy public highway.... It can track pedestrians and cyclists. It understands traffic lights. It can merge at highway speeds... after a few minutes, the idea of a computer-driven car seemed much less terrifying than the panorama of indecision, BlackBerry-fumbling, rule-flouting, and other vagaries of the humans around us... It can think faster than any mortal driver. It can attend to more information, react more quickly to emergencies, and keep track of more complicated routes. It never panics. It never gets angry. It never even blinks. In short, it is better than human in just about every way... Meanwhile, the legal and liability landscape is essentially uncharted. Everyone is moving toward this concept of the networked car, the car as a platform... we may well come to view the car less as an object to be owned than as a service to be streamed from the cloud.... When a car can drive itself to our door whenever we want it, why own something that spends more than 90 percent of the time simply parked?” - Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here | WIRED