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Let me start this post with a brief history of autonomous driving. Most people date the start of the autonomous driving era to 2004, with the Grand Challenge in the Mojave Desert over a 150-mile course. That turned out to be 142 miles longer than necessary, since the furthest any vehicle got was eight miles and the $1M prize was not awarded. Perhaps a more auspicious year to pick as the start of the autonomous driving era would be 2005, when the second Grand Challenge took place, with the prize money up to $2M. Five vehicles finished the entire 132-mile course. (I wrote about this in one of my first blog posts here Ten Years Ago Self-Driving Cars Couldn't Go Ten Miles.) The third Grand Challenge a couple of years later involved all the vehicles, along with other vehicles with professional drivers, all driving around a disused US Air Force base at the same time. Many vehicles successfully negotiated the course, obeying traffic laws and avoiding other vehicles. In just a few years, the technology had advanced so fast that everyone assumed we'd all be driving autonomous cars within another ten years...by 2017 or so.

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