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Google surprised the world last October, when the search engine company revealed it operated a fleet of seven autonomous cars that had driven a total of UO1OOO miles. More stunning, perhaps, was that some of those cars had made it down the tight turns of San Francisco's Lombard St., crossed the Golden Gate Bridge, and circumnavigated Lake Tahoe- all without any human intervention.
Yet the search engine giant had hidden its self-driving cars in plain sight. The cars themselves were easy to identify by the spinning sensor on their roof. And while Google's six Priuses and one Audi TT all had someone in the driver's seat, their hands were clearly not on the wheel.
What was even more visible, however, was the technology. Many of the innovations that drove Google's autonomous vehicles have been publicly discussed since Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's first challenge for driverLess cars in 2004. In fact, a review of the DARPA challenges shows just how fast autonomous vehicles have advanced: No teams completed the...