I was sitting in the backseat of a Volkswagen Touareg.

A computer tucked away in the hatch hummed along, and an LCD panel gleamed as bright as the California sun. My friend sat in the passenger seat and his daughter was right next to me. An engineer was in the driver’s seat, but no one was driving. The car negotiated around a closed-off parking lot by itself.

That was ten years ago when the actual test took place. Since then, there have been a few ups and downs with autonomous cars. This summer, a driver fatally crashed into a semi-truck while driving autonomously in a Tesla Model S sedan. Google has tested their robotic cars in San Francisco for several years, and they’ve had a few close calls and at least one crash at low speed.

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