Automotive Journal

The Detroit News reports that GM may have driverless cars on the road within 10 years.

The most significant obstacles facing the vehicles could be human rather than technical: government regulation, liability laws, privacy concerns and people's passion for the automobile and the control it gives them.

Much of the technology already exists for vehicles to take the wheel: radar-based cruise control, motion sensors, lane-change warning devices, electronic stability control and satellite-based digital mapping. And automated vehicles could dramatically improve life on the road, reducing crashes and congestion.

If people are interested.

"Now the question is what does society want to do with it?" Burns said. "You're looking at these issues of congestion, safety, energy and emissions. Technically there should be no reason why we can't transfer to a totally different world."

GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said.

He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018.

There have been science fiction movies showing cities run with driverless cars and it does sound like a way to reduce some of the 40,000+ deaths that occur in the U.S. each year from accidents. Many of the accidents are because of human error. Maybe a city like this with greatly reduced traffic accidents could be in our future.

You can see a few video clips of the driverless vehicles (also called autonomous vehicles) at the CES show here on YouTube. ABC News also has a video in their report.

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