Unfortunately, this article exposes its author's near total ignorance of the background and history of the topic, and nothing else. Driverless car projects hav

Unfortunately, this article exposes its author's near total ignorance of the background and history of the topic, and nothing else. Driverless car projects have been around for 30 years. Anyone following European R&D in this area can easily cast their minds back to the DRIVE project That's awesome. Where were they in DARPA's 2 Grand Challenges and the Urban Challenge [1]? We can also cast our minds to ALV [2] and NAVLAB [3], which were state-of-the-art in 80s and 90s respectively, so what? They demonstrated that a computer can control the car in a strict sense -- keeping it on the road and maybe stopping for obstacles, but driving is a bit more complicated than that. The real challenge is in navigating from point A to point B which observing rules of the road and interacting with other traffic participants safely -- something that was not demonstrated until 2007. Google's autonomous car program grew directly out of CMU's and Stanford's Urban Challenge projects. Volvo pulled off the more impressive feat of platooning the three cars behind a lorry for 200 kilometres on a busy Spanish motorway. It's not a more impressive feat by anyone's standard. Following the leader is a much simpler problem than navigating traffic independently. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2007)#Overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2007)#Ov... [2]: http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2108 http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/21... [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navlab#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navlab#History