Think about the cell-phone industry and how quickly things have progressed. Can you imagine if we had said to the cell-phone industry, don t develop this because it can t take pictures?
— Myra Blanco, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute s Center for Automated Vehicle Systems, on concerns over the development of driverless cars. MarketWatch points out that although there has been a lot of action on the autonomous-vehicle front lately — including word about Tesla s auto-pilot efforts, and a Baidu-BMW partnership to rival Google s self-driving cars — legislative, liability and safety issues are likely to drag out the transition to fully automated vehicles. Not only that, the different types of technologies being tested by many companies means different levels of progress in coming years. For example, MarketWatch has a handy infographic showing the expected evolution of autonomous cars, from partial automation today to conditional and high automation in 5 to 10 years, and full automation in more than 10 years.
Photo: Artistic rendering of Google s self-driving car. (Google via Associated Press)
