Decades before Google started outfitting Lexus SUVs with sensors and self-driving software, the driverless car du jour was an otherwise ordinary-looking Pontiac. In the 1920s and 1930s, a driverless car was more commonly known as a "phantom auto," and demonstrations of the technology drew thousands of spectators in cities across the United States. These cars weren't computer-driven, as they are today, but remote controlled. It's not clear from newspaper archives and other written accounts how many were ever in existence, anyway, though we do get a general sense of how they worked: The person operating the car would often follow in a second vehicle some distance behind; or, in at least one case, in a low-flying airplane, according to a 1932 account in the Times Recorder of Zanesville, Ohio. The car, which the newspaper called "one of the most amazing products of modern science," could be operated from as far as five miles away, its inventor said.