The Road to Self-driving Cars Is Full of Speed Bumps
Automakers are revving up for a very near future of fully autonomous vehicles. But the road ahead is rough.
By Hannah Fry|Thursday, October 25, 2018
The sun was barely above the horizon on March 13, 2004, but the Slash X saloon bar, in the middle of the Mojave Desert, was already thronging with people.
The bar is on the outskirts of Barstow, a California town between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. It’s a place popular with cowboys and off-roaders, but on that spring day it had drawn the attention of another kind of crowd. A makeshift stadium that had been built was packed with engineers, excited spectators and foolhardy petrol heads who all shared a similar dream: to be the first people on Earth to witness a driverless car win a race.
The race had been organized by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (nicknamed the Pentagon’s “mad science†division). The agency had been interested in unmanned vehicles for a while, and with good reason: Roadside bombs and targeted attacks on military vehicles were a major cause of death on the battlefield. Earlier that year, DARPA had announced its intention to make one-third of U.S. ground military forces vehicles autonomous by 2015.
http://discovermagazine.com/2018/nov/baby-can-you-drive-my-car
