The End Of Driving? Why Children Born Today Will Never Drive A Car

The auto industry's embrace of self-driving technology has been accelerating fast: On Wednesday, Audi announced that it would put fully-automated cars on the market in the next three years, while a fully autonomous Renault ZOE hit the road in Boston. Those technological advances mean that by the time today's toddlers come of age, they'll likely never even have to get behind the wheel of a car, according to Henrik Christensen, the director of the University of San Diego's Contextual Robotics Institute. "My own prediction is that kids born today will never get to drive a car," Christensen told the San Diego Union-Tribune in mid-December, ahead of a conference of 30 robotics scientists at the university in February. "Autonomous, driverless cars are 10, 15 years out. All the automotive companies--Daimler, GM, Ford--are saying that within five years they will have autonomous, driverless cars on the road."