I've written a few times that perhaps the biggest unsolved problem in robocars is how to know we have made them safe enough. While most people think of that in terms of government certification, the truth is that the teams building the cars are very focused on this, and know more about it than any regulator, but they still don't know enough. The challenge is going to be convincing your board of directors that the car is safe enough to release, for if it is not, it could ruin the company that releases it, at least if it's a big company with a reputation. We don't even have a good definition of what "safe enough" is though most people are roughly taking that as "a safety record superior to the average human." Some think it should be much more, few think it should be less.

The AImotive office is in a small converted house at the end of a quiet residential street in sunny Mountain View, spitting distance from Google's headquarters. Outside is a branded Toyota Prius covered in cameras, one of three autonomous cars the Hungarian company is testing in the sleepy neighbourhood. While other autonomous car projects, including those from Waymo and Uber, rely on an expensive (but very useful) radar-like system called Lidar for depth perception and obstacle detection (as well as cameras for seeing the colour of traffic lights and signs), AImotive is trying to do the same using regular cameras combined with artificial intelligence. This means the company can convert a regular car into a driverless one for a fraction of the price – around $6,000 – as opposed to $70,000-$100,000. "The whole traffic system is based on the visual system," explained founder and CEO Laszlo Kishonti. "Drivers don't have bat ears and sonars, you just look around and drive."

It's Monday morning, you're late for work, and as you merge onto the freeway you see it: the sea of red brake lights. It's going to be a slow, frustrating trip--for all the suckers who have to drive their own cars. You click yours into autonomous mode and spend the slog getting ahead on work emails, or even catching up on sleep. Yes, the day you become a co-driver is fast approaching. But as cars master how to see, understand, and navigate the world, researchers are shifting their attention to another subject: you. Paradoxical it may seem, but the more control the car has, the more it needs to know about the person sitting behind the wheel--whether they're paying attention, their mood, even their health.

Ford has shown the first images of its new self-driving Fusion Hybrid with a more powerful computer and improved, better-integrated sensors. It uses an upgraded version of the Fusion Hybrid platform, bolstered by self-driving hardware, a large new computer and electrical controls that "are close to production-ready," the company said in a press release. It also packs lower-profile LIDAR units that appear to be the "Puck" models from Velodyne, a company in which it recently invested $150 million. Cameras and other bits are smoothly built into the roof, making the hybrid less "hey, look at me, I'm a self-driving car" than other models. By contrast, the last autonomous Fusion model used since 2013 featured no less than four bulky LIDAR units.