Here's some inside information from some of the industry's pioneers.

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I visited Virginia Tech and spent an hour with Jared Bryson, the director of their smart road
testing facility . I live-streamed our conversation on Facebook so you can see what we discussed. Afterwards, I visited Michael Fleming, the CEO of TORC Robotics. His company is just across the field from the smart road. Fleming’s Virginia Tech team took third place in the DARPA competition in 2007 (and teams from Stanford and Carnegie Mellon have joined Google turkey whatsapp number list to work on autonomous driving there).



The TORC Robotics building includes military vehicles, all types of
ground-moving vehicles, and regular consumer cars
equipped with lidar, video cameras, and other sensors. TORC is partnering with many manufacturers to
bring us self-driving cars .

Finally, I spent a lot of time with
the Mercedes Benz autonomous driving team, and met a lot of
other people working on such technologies at Google, Alibaba, and elsewhere.


Mercedes took me for a drive around
Nevada in its latest E-Class, which is equipped with autonomous driving features.
You can see it in the video (Mercedes team principal Michael Haefner is in the front seat).

I am telling you this just so that you can see
that I may be better informed about the topic than others.

Which brings us to the main point of this article.

When I think of self-driving cars, I
don't think of the usual driver assistance features like garage door openings,
radar cruise control (all three of my Toyotas
have this, by the way), or parking.

No, I mean everything at once: when a car
can drive around the city without human intervention, and without a steering wheel at all.

This is what could become a threat to Uber. We are so far away
from being able to buy such a car for less than $40,000, which is
what it needs to cost to compete with the service. Some insiders
say we are 15 years away from such cars. Some say even further.