CES 2014: driverless cars are coming and they want to be your friends

If you were a fan of Knight Rider and dreamed of a car that could talk, drive itself and save you from peril, hold tight: it's coming. It does not exactly resemble Kitt, the Pontiac Firebird with a silky voice, and David Hasselhoff is not behind the wheel, but the spirit of the 1980s TV series pervades this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Car makers have taken over much of the world's biggest gadget expo to offer sneak previews of vehicles connected to smartphones and mobile computing technologies. Google and chip-maker Nvidia announced an alliance with GM, Honda, Audi, Hyundai to install cutting-edge Android technology into cars, a response to Apple's vigorous promotion of its own iOS car technology. "We're getting to the point where the car is an extension of you and really looks out for you," said Thilo Koslowski, an automotive analyst at Gartner.