Self-Driving Cars

Cars are incredibly useful inventions that allow people to get around easily, but some people find it exasperating to focus on the road during a long commute. Norman Geddes to the rescue! Way back in 1939, he created the first self-driving car for a GM exhibit. His car was guided by electromagnetic fields which were created by putting magnetic spikes inside the road itself. General Motors made this a reality in 1958, but the self-driving car was far from being released to the mass public.

In 1977, a Japanese company improved on GM’s design. Instead of relying on magnetic coils to tell the car which direction to move, they added a camera system that would analyze pictures of the road so the car knew when to turn. However, this car was super slow, with a max speed of 20 mph. In 1987, a German company tried to fix this problem and created a car that used a camera system and went up to 56 mph.

In 2016, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, announced that his company was going to begin creating self-driving cars safe for use by the mass public. These vehicles will be outfitted with cameras and sensors that provide the car with a 360 view of its surroundings. There are also autopilot features and Musk has said that drivers will be able to switch between driving the car and the car driving itself.