50 Fun Facts About Self-Driving Cars

Which talking Pontiac Trans Am drives itself to help David Hasselhoff's crime fighter in the TV series Knight Rider?

KITT stood for Knight Industries Two Thousand, and the car's dry voice belonged to actor William Daniels.

Which Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own races under the number 53 in Disney's film The Love Bug?

Herbie got his name in the film from a mechanic's uncle, a boxer whose nose was shaped like the Beetle's hood.

In which Arnold Schwarzenegger science-fiction film does the hero flee in a Johnnycab, a taxi driven by a chatty robot?

Total Recall modelled its Johnnycab's face and voice on actor Robert Picardo, and built the robot drivers as practical animatronics rather than digital effects.

Which Stephen King horror novel is named after a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury with a murderous will of its own?

Christine reached cinemas within eight months, directed by John Carpenter; King said the idea came from watching his own odometer roll over.

Which ride-hailing company's self-driving test car killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in 2018, a grim world first?

Uber halted its Arizona road tests after the crash, and the backup driver sitting at the wheel was later sentenced to three years' probation.

Which university won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge when its driverless Volkswagen crossed 132 miles of desert?

Stanford named its winning SUV Stanley and collected a $2 million prize, with four other robots also completing the course.

What was the outcome of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, a 2004 desert race for driverless vehicles?

No vehicle finished: the best robot, Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm, went off course in a hairpin turn after roughly seven miles, so the prize went unclaimed.

What cargo did a self-driving truck from the startup Otto haul 120 miles down a Colorado interstate in 2016?

Beer made the trip: 50,000 cans of Budweiser rode from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs after the driver climbed out of his seat.

Which thought experiment, framed by Philippa Foot in 1967, is used to debate whom a driverless car should hit?

Trolley problem cases ask whether to steer a runaway tram onto one person to spare five, the same grim sum a car's software could face.

Waymo began life in 2009 as the self-driving car project of which technology giant?

Google kept the project under wraps until October 2010, then spun it out in 2016 under the new name Waymo.

Lidar units on self-driving cars measure distance by timing the reflections of pulses of what?

Laser light bounces off objects and back to the sensor, a trick first tried in 1961, shortly after the laser itself was invented.

Which sensor, developed in secret by militaries before World War II, helps a self-driving car track traffic ahead?

Radar got its name in 1940, when the US Navy coined it as an acronym for radio detection and ranging.

Which carmaker launched its Autopilot driver aid in 2014, later selling an upgrade named Full Self-Driving?

Tesla's system was rated only Level 2 on the industry's automation scale, so a human had to supervise at all times despite the names.

Which billionaire chief executive dismissed lidar as expensive and unnecessary, insisting cameras alone can guide a car?

Elon Musk's stance set his cars apart from rivals such as Waymo, which pair lidar with centimetre-scale three-dimensional maps.

On the SAE scale of driving automation, which rating is the top rung, meaning a car that can drive itself anywhere?

Level 5 tops a scale that starts at zero, and as of late 2025 no system had reached it; robotaxis that stay inside mapped areas count as Level 4.

Which US state was first to pass a law allowing self-driving cars, later giving them red plates with an infinity symbol?

Nevada passed its law in June 2011, and its licensing chief said the infinity symbol was the best way to represent the car of the future.

Which online retail giant bought Zoox in 2020, the maker of a symmetrical robotaxi that can drive in either direction?

Amazon paid more than $1.2 billion for Zoox, whose purpose-built electric cab can reach 75 mph.

Kyle Vogt, co-founder of the robotaxi company Cruise, had earlier co-founded which live-streaming site loved by gamers?

Twitch grew out of Justin.tv, the site Vogt left university in his junior year to help build.

Which carmaker sponsored Futurama, the 1939 World's Fair ride that showed visitors a future of automated highways?

General Motors hired designer Norman Bel Geddes to build the ride, and by 1960 the company had a working prototype of an automated highway.

Which California city hosted Cruise's round-the-clock robotaxi service until the state pulled its permits in 2023?

San Francisco saw Cruise win round-the-clock approval in August 2023, only two months before a pedestrian collision cost the company its permits.

Which desert city did Waymo choose for the December 2018 launch of Waymo One, its paid robotaxi service?

Phoenix riders went on to get the world's first robotaxi rides with no safety driver on board, after tests in suburban Chandler.

In 2015, the first non-employee to ride in the fully driverless prototype behind Waymo had which disability?

Blindness made the Austin passenger a pointed choice: the prototype he rode in had no steering wheel or floor pedals for anyone to grab.

Which German carmaker offered Drive Pilot from 2022, a Level 3 system that could take over in motorway traffic jams?

Mercedes first limited Drive Pilot to speeds under 40 mph, in daylight and clear weather, with another vehicle ahead, then stopped offering it in January 2026.

Which Japanese carmaker began leasing 100 Legend sedans in 2021 with a certified Level 3 system named Traffic Jam Pilot?

Honda won Japanese government safety certification for the system, and the Legend line itself was retired at the end of the same year.

Which Toyota became the first production car sold with automatic parallel parking, as an option in Japan in 2003?

Prius drivers in Japan had the option three years before it reached any other market, on the Lexus LS in 2006.

In 1995, Carnegie Mellon's Navlab 5 minivan steered itself nearly all the way from Pittsburgh to which coastal city?

San Diego ended a 2,850-mile trip dubbed No Hands Across America, on which the computer did the steering for all but about 50 miles.

Which type of AI program did Carnegie Mellon's ALVINN project use in the late 1980s to steer a robot van?

Neural network is in the name: ALVINN stands for An Autonomous Land Vehicle in a Neural Network, and its approach became the basis of modern control methods.

In which country was Mobileye founded in 1999, the camera-vision firm that Intel later bought for $15.3 billion?

Israel had never seen a bigger tech takeover when Intel bought the firm, which grew out of research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Which Chinese tech giant runs Apollo Go, a robotaxi service cleared in 2022 to run with no safety driver in Wuhan?

Baidu received China's first batch of permits for commercial rides with no safety driver, issued by the governments of Wuhan and Chongqing.

In which city did a radio-controlled driverless car, the American Wonder, weave through thick traffic in 1925?

New York crowds watched it travel up Broadway and down Fifth Avenue, barely missing a milk wagon before it crashed into a sedan.

Which German professor built VaMoRs, a 1980s robot van that drove itself at up to 96 km/h guided by camera images?

Ernst Dickmanns followed up in 1994 by sending twin robot cars more than 1,000 km through heavy traffic on a Paris motorway with guests on board.

Which hacker, first to unlock an iPhone at seventeen, founded comma.ai to add self-driving features to ordinary cars?

George Hotz's firm gives away its openpilot driving software as open source, and Consumer Reports ranked it above every carmaker's system in 2020.

In which Asian city did the startup nuTonomy begin giving invited members of the public robotaxi rides in August 2016?

Singapore's trial used six modified Renault Zoes and Mitsubishi i-MiEVs that kept to the district around the company's office.

Which university built the Moral Machine, a site asking people worldwide whom a self-driving car should spare?

MIT's Media Lab ran the survey in over 200 countries, and the answers showed that preferences about whom to save differ widely between nations.

Which Chinese city was the finish line when four driverless electric vans ended a 100-day trek from Italy in 2010?

Shanghai was hosting its World Expo, and the 9,900-mile run was the first intercontinental land journey completed by driverless vehicles.

Roborace, a race series for driverless electric cars, tested its technology at which motorsport championship's events?

Formula E hosted the trials from 2016 to 2018, and Roborace's Robocar was styled by Daniel Simon, a designer of vehicles for the film Tron: Legacy.

Which British luxury brand built the electric I-Pace, the SUV Waymo ordered by the thousand for its robotaxi fleet?

Jaguar agreed to supply up to 20,000 of the cars, an order estimated to be worth more than $1 billion.

Which tech giant spent a decade on Project Titan, a secretive electric self-driving car effort it cancelled in 2024?

Apple shifted the project's resources to generative AI when it pulled the plug, and more than 600 employees were laid off.

Which arm of the US government runs DARPA, the research agency that staged the Grand Challenge races for robot vehicles?

Department of Defense interest was practical: Congress approved the prize money hoping a third of military ground forces could be autonomous by 2015.

Which lidar pioneer, whose spinning sensors guided most finishers of a 2007 DARPA race, began as a subwoofer maker?

Velodyne changed course after founder David Hall entered the 2005 Grand Challenge, then sold his sensor to five of the six teams that finished in 2007.

What term, also used for location-triggered phone alerts, describes the virtual boundary a robotaxi must stay inside?

Geofence software can log each time a device enters, leaves or lingers in the marked area, which fleet managers use to catch unauthorised trips.

What army-flavoured term describes trucks driving in a tight, electronically linked group that brakes as one?

Platooning saves fuel because closely spaced vehicles meet less air resistance, and the electronic link removes the gap needed for human reaction time.

Which American luxury brand introduced Super Cruise in 2017, letting drivers go hands-free on certain highways?

Cadillac launched it on the CT6 sedan, and the system hands control back to the driver whenever it leaves the roads and conditions it was built for.

Ghostrider, built by Anthony Levandowski's Berkeley team for the first DARPA Grand Challenge, was a robot what?

Motorcycle it was, and Levandowski donated Ghostrider to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 2007.

Which American desert hosted the first DARPA Grand Challenge, on a route beside Interstate 15 near Barstow?

Mojave terrain made a brutal test over a 150-mile route, and DARPA doubled the prize to $2 million for the rematch.

Which satellite navigation system, owned by the US Space Force, helps a self-driving car find its rough position?

GPS signals for civilians once carried a deliberate error that limited accuracy to about 100 metres, which only military receivers could correct.

Which Chrysler hybrid minivan did Waymo start testing in 2016 and later plan to buy by the tens of thousands?

Pacifica orders began with just 100 vans, then swelled in 2018 to plans for up to 62,000 more.

Sebastian Thrun, the robot-car pioneer who led the team behind Stanley, co-founded which online education company?

Udacity sells technical courses it calls nanodegrees, and Thrun also served as chief executive of the Kitty Hawk Corporation.

Which English city hosted the first public-road trial of the LUTZ Pathfinder, a two-seat driverless pod, in 2016?

Milton Keynes put the pod among pedestrians, cyclists and other traffic; the two-seaters were built by a Coventry firm in a £20 million government project.

Which Swedish carmaker built the XC90, the SUV converted into the test car that killed Elaine Herzberg in 2018?

Volvo fitted the XC90 with its own automatic emergency braking, but investigators found it was switched off whenever the self-driving computer was in control.