Self-Driving Cars
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50 free Self-Driving Cars trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cars that can drive themselves have gone from a fairground fantasy to something you can hail on a city street, and the story of how that happened is full of odd turns: robots stranded within sight of the start line, a first delivery nobody would call glamorous, and engineers arguing over which sensors a car really needs. This quiz covers how the technology works, from the sensors on the roof to the scale engineers use to rate automation, along with the competitions, companies and people who built it. It also takes in the hard questions, such as crashes, regulation and the ethics of a machine deciding what to do in an emergency, plus a few famous cars from film and television that needed no driver at all. It is pitched for curious general readers, students working on a transport or technology topic, and car fans who want to test what they know. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will pick up the story even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which talking Pontiac Trans Am drives itself to help David Hasselhoff's crime fighter in the TV series Knight Rider?
KITT
KITT stood for Knight Industries Two Thousand, and the car's dry voice belonged to actor William Daniels.
Q 02Which Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own races under the number 53 in Disney's film The Love Bug?
Herbie
Herbie got his name in the film from a mechanic's uncle, a boxer whose nose was shaped like the Beetle's hood.
Q 03In which Arnold Schwarzenegger science-fiction film does the hero flee in a Johnnycab, a taxi driven by a chatty robot?
Total Recall
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.
Q 04Which Stephen King horror novel is named after a possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury with a murderous will of its own?
Christine
Christine reached cinemas within eight months, directed by John Carpenter; King said the idea came from watching his own odometer roll over.
Q 05Which ride-hailing company's self-driving test car killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in 2018, a grim world first?
Uber
Uber halted its Arizona road tests after the crash, and the backup driver sitting at the wheel was later sentenced to three years' probation.
Q 06Which university won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge when its driverless Volkswagen crossed 132 miles of desert?
Stanford
Stanford named its winning SUV Stanley and collected a $2 million prize, with four other robots also completing the course.
Q 07What was the outcome of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, a 2004 desert race for driverless vehicles?
No vehicle finished
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.
Q 08What cargo did a self-driving truck from the startup Otto haul 120 miles down a Colorado interstate in 2016?
Beer
Beer made the trip: 50,000 cans of Budweiser rode from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs after the driver climbed out of his seat.
Q 09Which thought experiment, framed by Philippa Foot in 1967, is used to debate whom a driverless car should hit?
Trolley problem
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.
Q 10Waymo 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.
Q 11Lidar units on self-driving cars measure distance by timing the reflections of pulses of what?
Laser light
Laser light bounces off objects and back to the sensor, a trick first tried in 1961, shortly after the laser itself was invented.
Q 12Which sensor, developed in secret by militaries before World War II, helps a self-driving car track traffic ahead?
Radar
Radar got its name in 1940, when the US Navy coined it as an acronym for radio detection and ranging.
Q 13Which carmaker launched its Autopilot driver aid in 2014, later selling an upgrade named Full Self-Driving?
Tesla
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.
Q 21Which desert city did Waymo choose for the December 2018 launch of Waymo One, its paid robotaxi service?
Phoenix
Phoenix riders went on to get the world's first robotaxi rides with no safety driver on board, after tests in suburban Chandler.
Q 22In 2015, the first non-employee to ride in the fully driverless prototype behind Waymo had which disability?
Blindness
Blindness made the Austin passenger a pointed choice: the prototype he rode in had no steering wheel or floor pedals for anyone to grab.
Q 23Which German carmaker offered Drive Pilot from 2022, a Level 3 system that could take over in motorway traffic jams?
Mercedes
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.
Q 14Which billionaire chief executive dismissed lidar as expensive and unnecessary, insisting cameras alone can guide a car?
Elon Musk
Elon Musk's stance set his cars apart from rivals such as Waymo, which pair lidar with centimetre-scale three-dimensional maps.
Q 15On the SAE scale of driving automation, which rating is the top rung, meaning a car that can drive itself anywhere?
Level 5
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.
Q 16Which US state was first to pass a law allowing self-driving cars, later giving them red plates with an infinity symbol?
Nevada
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.
Q 17Which online retail giant bought Zoox in 2020, the maker of a symmetrical robotaxi that can drive in either direction?
Amazon
Amazon paid more than $1.2 billion for Zoox, whose purpose-built electric cab can reach 75 mph.
Q 18Kyle Vogt, co-founder of the robotaxi company Cruise, had earlier co-founded which live-streaming site loved by gamers?
Twitch
Twitch grew out of Justin.tv, the site Vogt left university in his junior year to help build.
Q 19Which carmaker sponsored Futurama, the 1939 World's Fair ride that showed visitors a future of automated highways?
General Motors
General Motors hired designer Norman Bel Geddes to build the ride, and by 1960 the company had a working prototype of an automated highway.
Q 20Which California city hosted Cruise's round-the-clock robotaxi service until the state pulled its permits in 2023?
San Francisco
San Francisco saw Cruise win round-the-clock approval in August 2023, only two months before a pedestrian collision cost the company its permits.
Q 24Which Japanese carmaker began leasing 100 Legend sedans in 2021 with a certified Level 3 system named Traffic Jam Pilot?
Honda
Honda won Japanese government safety certification for the system, and the Legend line itself was retired at the end of the same year.
Q 25Which Toyota became the first production car sold with automatic parallel parking, as an option in Japan in 2003?
Prius
Prius drivers in Japan had the option three years before it reached any other market, on the Lexus LS in 2006.
Q 26In 1995, Carnegie Mellon's Navlab 5 minivan steered itself nearly all the way from Pittsburgh to which coastal city?
San Diego
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.
Q 27Which type of AI program did Carnegie Mellon's ALVINN project use in the late 1980s to steer a robot van?
Neural network
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.
Q 28In which country was Mobileye founded in 1999, the camera-vision firm that Intel later bought for $15.3 billion?
Israel
Israel had never seen a bigger tech takeover when Intel bought the firm, which grew out of research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Q 29Which Chinese tech giant runs Apollo Go, a robotaxi service cleared in 2022 to run with no safety driver in Wuhan?
Baidu
Baidu received China's first batch of permits for commercial rides with no safety driver, issued by the governments of Wuhan and Chongqing.
Q 30In which city did a radio-controlled driverless car, the American Wonder, weave through thick traffic in 1925?
New York
New York crowds watched it travel up Broadway and down Fifth Avenue, barely missing a milk wagon before it crashed into a sedan.