The self-driving era is here, the question is what comes next

The self-driving era is here, just not the one that was promised. Instead of sleek pods without steering wheels ready to chauffeur buyers off the lot, there are mostly driverless Chevy compacts, Chrysler minivans, and Ford box trucks with bolted-on hardware trundling around bits of the U.S. southwest and, as of August, a short loop of roads in Ontario. But while the current reality has fallen far short of automaker predictions, it's worth stopping to acknowledge that there are trucks driving around public Canadian roads making deliveries, without a soul inside. The technological achievement of the feat has huge implications for business, and society, but the latest industry outlook, humbled by past failures, points to a more gradual rollout. "People think there will be a magic day where suddenly everything will be autonomous, but that's not how this is going to work," said Raquel Urtasun, a leading artificial intelligence researcher and chief executive of Toronto-based autonomous outfit Waabi Innovation Inc. "You will have certain areas where this technology is going to deploy, and then those areas will expand under more and more difficult situations."