History of self-driving cars
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Self-driving cars were anticipated by experiments in radio control during the 1920s, and the development of advanced driver assistance (ADAS) after WWII. Trials of self-driving vehicles began in the 1950s with the first semi-autonomous car developed in 1977 by Japan's Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory.
In the United States, Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab began semi-autonomous vehicle projects in 1984, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In Europe, similar projects were led by Mercedes-Benz and Bundeswehr University Munich's EUREKA Prometheus Project, beginning in 1987.
The United States allocated US$650 million in 1991 for research on the National Automated Highway System, which demonstrated automated driving combining highway-embedded automation with vehicle technology. Until the second DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, automated vehicle research in the United States was primarily funded by DARPA, the US Army and the US Navy, producing incremental advances in speed, driving competence, control, and sensor systems.
Since then, numerous private companies and both private and public research organizations around the world have developed working autonomous vehicles. In 2015, the Cruise subsidiary of General Motors began road testing in California. Two years later, Waymo was the first to commercialize a robotaxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, followed by a similar service by DeepRoute.ai in Shenzhen. Cruise later shut down in 2024, with several other manufacturers scaling back plans for self-driving technology in 2022, including Ford and Volkswagen.
Legal and regulatory developments to accommodate the testing and facilitation of self-driving vehicles have also taken place world wide. In the 2010s and 2020s, some UNECE and EU members developed rules and regulations related to automated vehicles, with various cities planning to operate transport systems for driverless cars and to allow testing of robotic cars in traffic. In 2016, the US National Economic Council and US Department of Transportation (USDOT) released the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy. The first known fatal accident involving a vehicle being driven by itself took place in Williston, Florida, in 2016, while the first reported pedestrian killed by a self-driving car was in 2018.
From the 2010s, increasingly rapid progress in research and development has taken place, often accompanied by innaccurate predictions of complete autonomy, which capability is so far confined to driverless taxi services in designated cities. As of early 2024, several manufacturers sell cars with automated driving systems in the US, Japan and Europe.