In the 1920s, motor vehicles claimed tens of thousands of lives annually — a death rate 18 times higher than today. This new technology promised to render city streets safe once again. But those hopes were soon dashed when the futuristic vehicle’s operators lost control — first at Sixty-Second Street and again moments later at Columbus Circle — before finally crashing the would-be wonder into another vehicle.
Despite this early misstep, the auto industry continued to daydream about remote-controlled cars. At the 1939 World’s Fair, the Futurama exhibit by General Motors featured an enormous motorized diorama of an American city. Free-flowing highways plied by self-driving cars, trucks, and buses crisscrossed bustling districts of slender skyscrapers. There was even a “traffic control tower” where, the future city’s designers imagined, dispatchers would direct the movements of tens of thousands of vehicles by radio. By the 1950s, guide wires embedded in the road surface had replaced radio as the preferred technology for remote-controlled vehicles. Ironically, it was RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, that staged the first successful demonstration of this approach in the 1950s.
These early prototypes showed the technical feasibility of automated driving, but their high cost and the lackluster demand for such features meant that neither radio-controlled nor wire-guided cars caught on. The price tag for guided-vehicle highways was thought to be as high as $200,000 per lane-mile. If fully built out, this road upgrade might have added more than 40 percent to the cost of building the Interstate Highway System, already the largest public works project in American history. Meanwhile, despite the dangers and drudgery of long or late-night drives, automakers were still riding a wave of consumer excitement about driving. They focused on producing powerful new cars that were exhilarating to drive.
These early dreams imagined a self-driving future based on external guidance. But by the 1960s, the focus had shifted to harnessing the new technology of computers to design vehicles that could truly, independently drive themselves autonomously, without outside help. At Stanford University, for the first time anywhere, researchers built robots that used cameras to see and computers to navigate. In highly controlled experiments, these early droids followed white lines and avoided obstacles placed in their path.