So now, without any further ado let's dive into the how the self-driving car industry looked like 15–20 years ago! Unless you are living under a rock, you probably know that the self-driving car industry has become one of the hottest industries in the last 5–10 years. Some of the world's biggest companies like Google, Tesla, GM are working on self-driving cars. These companies have spent more than 120 billion dollars on self-driving car R&D just in 2020 alone! The CEOs of these companies are saying that they are on the verge of creating the driverless cars that we all imagine when we think about our future cities(the ones where you can just fall asleep in to get the extra hour of sleep).

This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Deep in the Mojave Desert, 60 miles from the city of Barstow, is the Slash X Ranch Cafe, a former ranch where dirt bike riders and ATV adventurers can drink beer and eat burgers with fellow daredevils speeding across the desert. Displayed on a wall alongside trucker caps and taxidermy is a plaque that memorializes the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, a 142-mile race whose starting point was at Slash X Ranch Cafe. It was the first race in the world without human drivers. Instead, it featured the fever-dream inventions -- robotic motorcycles, monster Humvees -- of a handful of software engineers who were hellbent on creating fully autonomous vehicles and winning the million-dollar prize offered by the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

In October, a modified Dallara-15 Indy Lights race car programmed by MIT Driverless will hit the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour. The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is the world's first head-to-head, high-speed autonomous race. It offers MIT Driverless a chance to grab a piece of the $1.5 million purse while outmaneuvering fellow university innovators on what is arguably the most iconic racecourse. But the IAC has implications beyond the track. Stakeholders for the event include Sebastian Thrun, a former winner of the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles, and Reilly Brennan, a lecturer at Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research and a partner at Trucks Venture Capital.

When the inquisition required him to drop his study of what the Roman Catholic Church insisted was not a heliocentric solar system, Galileo Galilei turned his energy to the less controversial question of how to stick a telescope onto a helmet. The king of Spain had offered a hefty reward to anyone who could solve the stubborn mystery of how to determine a ship's longitude while at sea: 6,000 ducats up front and another 2,000 per year for life. Galileo thought his headgear, with the telescope fixed over one eye and making its wearer look like a misaligned unicorn, would net him the reward. Determining latitude is easy for any sailor who can pick out the North Star, but finding longitude escaped the citizens of the 17th century, because it required a precise knowledge of time. That's based on a simple principle: Say you set your clock before sailing west from Greenwich.

This article is my personal account on the work at Stanford on Stanley, the winning robot in the DARPA Grand Challenge. Between July 2004 and October 2005, my then-postdoc Michael Montemerlo and I led a team of students, engineers, and professionals with the single vision of claiming one of the most prestigious trophies in the field of robotics: the DARPA Grand Challenge (DARPA 2004). The Grand Challenge, organized by the U.S. government, was unprecedented in the nation's history. It was the first time that the U.S. Congress had appropriated a cash price for advancing technological innovation. My team won this prize, competing with some 194 other teams.

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" -Peter Thiel The closing quarter of the twentieth century was peak tech innovation in the United States. AT&T's Bell Labs invented the information age with the transistor and data networking, and many transformative technologies tangential to its core business: from solar cells to the Unix operating system to lasers.1 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) brought about human-computer interaction with the initial computer mouse, as well as laser printing and Ethernet networking.2 In the 80's Pixar was born, creating the first ever computer-animated sequence in a feature film with novel computer-generated imagery (CGI).3,4 At the same time Gates and Allen were hacking at something special that soon revolutionized computing, as were Wozniak and Jobs.5,6 Amidst the heyday of invention in the world of bits, the "space race" brought about massive innovation and accomplishments in the world of atoms: government competition between the US and Russia put humans on the moon for the first time.

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" -Peter Thiel The closing quarter of the twentieth century was peak tech innovation in the United States. AT&T's Bell Labs invented the information age with the transistor and data networking, and many transformative technologies tangential to its core business: from solar cells to the Unix operating system to lasers.1 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) brought about human-computer interaction with the initial computer mouse, as well as laser printing and Ethernet networking.2 In the 80's Pixar was born, creating the first ever computer-animated sequence in a feature film with novel computer-generated imagery (CGI).3,4 At the same time Gates and Allen were hacking at something special that soon revolutionized computing, as were Wozniak and Jobs.5,6 Amidst the heyday of invention in the world of bits, the "space race" brought about massive innovation and accomplishments in the world of atoms: government competition between the US and Russia put humans on the moon for the first time.

A few days ago, the UK Department of Transport announced a consultation on Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS). This led to media outlets such as the BBC arguing that hands-free driving might be legal in the UK as soon as Spring 2021. But some went further, claiming this was a step towards self-driving cars by next year. Automated safety features are a significant part of cutting-edge car technology, so a major feature in most electric vehicles, although far from exclusively for EVs. Tesla TSLA in particular makes a lot of noise about its self-driving abilities, and contender Lucid is claiming it will go further with its Air.

If federal prosecutors successfully prosecute Anthony Levandowski for 33 federal charges of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, the self-driving engineer could face millions in fines and decades in prison. The accusations aren't new--they rehash the core of Waymo's civil case against Uber, which settled in February 2018--but their resurfacing in this format threatens to put a dismal end to a career remarkable for its range and variation. For nearly 20 years, the French-American Levandowski has played a kind of purposeful Forrest Gump for the world of autonomous driving. Rather than stumbling into the center of one momentous event after another, Levandowski has put himself there. And he has left a mixed trail in his wake: Former colleagues have described him as brilliant, engaging, motivating, fast-charging, inconsiderate, a weasel, and just plain evil.

They are, it seems safe to say, just about everywhere--roaming the streets of San Francisco, New York City, Phoenix, Boston, Singapore, Paris, London, Munich, and Beijing. And as Waymo (Google's self-driving car project) launches the world's first fleet of truly driverless cars in Arizona, nearly every automaker, all serious tech companies, and a flock of startups are rushing to colonize an industry that has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives--and generate trillions of dollars. What retains its shock value is how quickly we've gotten here. Ten years ago, there was no reason to think the idea of being whisked about town by a collection of zeroes and ones while you napped or texted or watched TV was anything but the province of science fiction. Namely, the folks watching a group of robots roam an abandoned Air Force base outside Los Angeles, moving through intersections, merging into traffic, finding their own parking spaces, and more.