It’s been years that people working on “driver-assistance systems”, and also “self driving systems”.
Advanced driver assistance systems such as Adaptive Cruise Control, Automatic Parking, Blind Spot Monitor is getting better and better every single day. And therefore, we are getting closer the perfect “self driving cars”.
In 1986 (I wasn’t born by that time by the way 🙂 ), it (the movie of “Knight Rider”) was only a science fiction. Maybe people were laughing on it at that time.
It is seen as a normal technology to interact with our automobile now.
As the sensor technology gets higher day by day, and data processing time decreases, a car is able to do its reactions in different situations by its own algorithms (which means its “thinking”s in a simple way).
According to wikipedia; The first self-sufficient and truly autonomous cars appeared in the 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University’s Navlab. Later on, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Bosch, Nissan, Renault, Toyota, Audi, Volvo, Tesla Motors (and so on …) have developed their working prototype autonomous vehicles.
For sure, Google too :))
Google has changened its self driving car project under the name of “Waymo“. Google’s driveless car has ride over a 2 million miles until now for testing, it still continues for improvement for “perfection” :))