If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motor car, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination … I think that the 20th century reaches almost its purest expression on the highway. Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction.

it might be killing three times the number of cyclists over a million rides than another model

machines tend to be designed for the lowest possible risk and the least casualties

self-driving car

Namely, what can we do with parking lots and structures?

Uber's self-driving car program, suspended in San Francisco two months ago, had mapping problems that caused the cars to run at least six red lights in the city, the New York Times reports.

The biggest challenge in building an autonomous vehicle is giving the car the ability to see the world. It requires a thorough understanding of lidar, the radar-like system of lasers that creates the digital map each car needs to navigate the world safely and competently.

The Tesla accident in May, researchers say, was not a failure of computer vision. But it underscored the limitations of the science in applications like driverless cars despite remarkable progress in recent years, fueled by digital data, computer firepower and software inspired by the human brain.