In the crowded streets of San Francisco, companies such as Uber and Cruise Automation have been testing self-driving vehicles for years now. In suburban Phoenix, hundreds of autonomous Waymo vehicles are driving as many as 25,000 miles per day. There are, in fact, dozens of cities around the world hosting pilot programs for self-driving vehicles. The latest addition to that list is Columbus, Ohio, where a series of self-driving shuttles are being deployed on city streets this week. The electric, low-speed vehicles -- operated by the Michigan-based start-up May Mobility -- will begin testing and mapping local streets before accepting passengers in December, the company said. Eventually, there could be as many as 10 shuttles operating in downtown Columbus.

Automotive prognosticators tend to agree that vehicles in the future will be autonomous and electric, with highly connected cabins that allow riders to watch films, shop or get ahead on work. It's a big and exciting vision, but car companies are still figuring out what those vehicles might look like and how exactly they'd function. Mercedes-Benz attempted to fill in some of the blanks this week by unveiling a concept vehicle that reimagines how people will interact with autonomous vehicles. The true novelty of the vehicle -- a pill-bug-like van known as the Vision Urbanetic -- is that it's designed for interchangeable bodies that can be swapped out in minutes, depending on the circumstance. The idea, the company said, is to create vehicles that can adapt to urban settings in the future, when there may be fewer vehicles on the road but when those vehicles are expected to do more than merely ferry passengers from one place to another.

Automotive prognosticators tend to agree that vehicles in the future will be autonomous and electric, with highly connected cabins that allow riders to watch films, shop or get ahead on work. It's a big and exciting vision, but car companies are still figuring out what those vehicles might look like and how exactly they'd function. Mercedes-Benz attempted to fill in some of the blanks this week by unveiling a concept vehicle that reimagines how people will interact with autonomous vehicles. The true novelty of the vehicle -- a pill-bug-like van known as the Vision Urbanetic -- is that it's designed for interchangeable bodies that can be swapped out in minutes, depending on the circumstance. The idea, the company said, is to create vehicles that can adapt to urban settings in the future, when there may be fewer vehicles on the road but when those vehicles are expected to do more than merely ferry passengers from one place to another.