The electric 2022 Chevrolet Bolt EUV offers GM's hands-free Super Cruise highway driving assistang. Fox News Autos Editor Gary Gastelu lets it take him for a spin. Polaris is getting into the autonomous car business … slowly. The company is jointly developing a self-driving shuttle with Optimus Ride, which currently operates pilot loops in Brooklyn, Washington D.C. and several other locations using prototypes built on the Polaris Gem e6 platform. Polaris and Optimus Ride are jointly-developing a production autonomous shuttle.

Welcome to the future: Step inside this toaster. On Monday, the autonomous vehicle company Zoox--acquired by Amazon over the summer for a reported $1.2 billion--rolled out its robotaxi. The design, which has been in development for six years, may look familiar. Almost every autonomous vehicle concept revealed over the past few years--by carmakers, engineers, ride-hailers, and startups--has been a neat, rectangular box. In this case, form equals function.

Optimus Ride has already deployed its autonomous transportation systems in the Seaport area of Boston, in a mixed-use development in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre industrial park. Some of the biggest companies in the world are spending billions in the race to develop self-driving vehicles that can go anywhere. Meanwhile, Optimus Ride, a startup out of MIT, is already helping people get around by taking a different approach. The company's autonomous vehicles only drive in areas it comprehensively maps, or geofences. Self-driving vehicles can safely move through these areas at about 25 miles per hour with today's technology.

In 2018, sharp observers of self-driving vehicles may have noticed that a few of the things have arrived. While most are still testing, only allowing employees inside--including Uber, Ford, Argo, Aurora, and Cruise--this year also saw the 25,000th passenger trip provided by a collaboration between Aptiv and Lyft, which uses a handful of autonomous vehicles to ferry riders around Las Vegas. Just this month, Waymo launched a driverless service in the Phoenix area, if a limited one. This body of evidence should help you understand the nuanced answer to an increasingly common question. "We get asked, 'When are we going to see these cars?' My answer is, essentially, 'It depends where you live,'" says Karl Iagnemma, Aptiv's president of automotive mobility.

Before a self-driving Uber killed a pedestrian one night in March, Arizona was an autonomous vehicle developer's paradise. Governor Doug Ducey piloted a no-rules approach to regulation, trusting developers like Uber, Waymo, and General Motors would ensure the safety of their tech. After the deadly crash, Ducey--who proceeded to ban Uber's self-driving cars from public roads--wasn't the only public official who underwent an attitude adjustment. Boston city officials quietly asked companies to pause testing. Cars came off the roads in Pittsburgh and California.

NuTonomy and Optimus Ride have agreed to suspend their self-driving car tests in Boston in the wake of Sunday's tragedy in Arizona, where an autonomous Uber vehicle killed a pedestrian. "We are working with City of Boston officials to ensure that our automated vehicle pilots continue to adhere to high standards of safety," a nuTonomy spokeswoman said in a statement. "We have complied with the City of Boston's request to temporarily halt autonomous vehicle testing on public roads." Karl Iagnemma, chief executive of nuTonomy, said the response to the crash will be vital for the future of driverless cars and whether passengers are willing to ride in them. "The reality is we may work very hard as technology developers and end up with a technology that members of the public are uncomfortable with," Iagnemma said, speaking at an event in Cambridge last night.

Private parties owning lots in Boston's Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park have been enabling autonomous vehicle testing on their property for the past year. The land was paved, yet undeveloped. This made it a perfect testbed for autonomous vehicles. This enabled companies working to perfect autonomous car technologies to test their creations in a controlled environment away from normal traffic. Tom Miller, the vice president of Kavanaugh Advisory Group, told the Boston Herald: "We think it's a great adventure, we think it's a great idea, and if an opportunity comes and we have a location where we could do it again, we'd do it in a heartbeat."