As early as 1930, the concept of autonomous vehicles was circulating. As per Weber (2014), oftentimes in fictional books the driverless car and taxis were shown in improving millions of lives, however, it was not seen as a revolutionary idea but only the improvement was seen in increments till the beginning of the century.
In 2005, it was the first time in California’s Mojave Desert in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) challenge, several driverless vehicles were crossing 150 miles (ca. 241 km) of the long track (Fagnant & Kockelman, 2013; Weber, 2014).
In 2007, six more teams completed the Urban challenge. The task was to deal with moving and fixed obstacles and obeying traffic rules to simulating realistic everyday traffic scenarios.
According to the National Highway Transport Safety Administration (NHTSA) for autonomous vehicles,
“[…] those in which operation of the vehicle occurs without direct driver input to control the steering, acceleration, and braking and are designed so that the driver is not expected to constantly monitor the roadway while operating in self-driving mode”.
As per IHS Automotive, 2014, Electronic systems that complemented cars today to control their driving without the human driver need are defined as Autonomous vehicle technology. It is also speculated that 230 thousand autonomous vehicles, globally can be sold till 2025 and by 2035 the number will grow to 11.8 million cars.
The requirement for driverless cars in their journey stated by IHS Automotive 2014, is to be able to drive from the current location to a defined target by obeying traffic rules which include the reading and understanding of all necessary road signs and signals.
As per BBC News, 2014, the current scenario shows that public roads in four states Michigan, Florida, Nevada, and California of the United States of America, and the government in the United Kingdom, allowed the test to run from 1st January 2015.
Source:- The UK to allow driverless cars on public roads in January. BBC News; IHS Automotive. (2014). Automotive Technology Research Emerging Technologies: Autonomous Cars; Weber, M. (2014). Where to? A History of Autonomous Vehicles. Computer History Museum.