William Marrion Branham, 27 Sept 1958. Branham Tabernacle, Jeffersonville, Indiana, USA.

Sermon title (excerpt from tape recording): Why Are We Not A Denomination?

"In 1933…the vision of the Lord came to me up here and predicted that, Germany would rise up and have put that Maginot Line there. Many of you remember. And how they’d be all fortified in there, and the Americans would take a great beating right there at that line. It also said what would take place, and about Roosevelt and them things, how he would run and make that fourth term. Perfectly, just exactly the way it come to pass. And also said that cars would keep getting more like an egg, until the last days they’d be just in the shape of an egg.
Now, I said, "It’ll come to pass that those cars will not be run by a steering wheel; it’ll be something another run." It’s them cars they’re bringing out right now, remote control, for safety. Correct. You won’t be able to enter into a city then, a twenty-mile zone, you can just go twenty mile. You can’t hit another car, because it’s remote control. See, it’s going like that right now.
And I said, "Remember, in that day, before the end time comes, before the end time comes, that a woman… Now, you all keep this wrote down. There’ll be a great powerful woman raise up, either be President, or dictator, or some great powerful woman in this United States. And She’ll sink under the influence of women. Now, you remember; that’s THUS SAITH THE LORD."

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Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#International

Driverless car

The driverless car concept embraces an emerging family of
highly automated cognitive and control technologies, ultimately aimed
at a full "taxi-like" experience for car users, but without a human
driver. Together with alternative propulsion, it is seen by some as the main technological advance in car technology by 2020.

Driverless passenger programs include the 800 million ECU EUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles (1987-1995), the 2getthere passenger vehicles (using the FROG-navigation technology) from the Netherlands, the ARGO research project from Italy, and the DARPA Grand Challenge from the USA. For the wider application of artificial intelligence to automobiles see smart cars.

History

The history of autonomous vehicles starts in 1977 with the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Lab in Japan. On a dedicated, clearly marked course it achieved speeds of up to 30 km/h (20 miles per hour),
by tracking white street markers (special hardware was necessary, since
commercial computers were much slower than they are today).

In the 1980s a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robot van, designed by Ernst Dickmanns and his team at the Universität der Bundeswehr in Munich, Germany, achieved 100 km/h on streets without traffic. Subsequently, the European Commission began funding the 800 million Euro EUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles (1987-1995).

Also in the 1980s the DARPA-funded Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) in the United States achieved the first road-following demonstration that used laser radar (Environmental Research Institute of Michigan), computer vision (Carnegie Mellon University and SRI), and autonomous robotic control (Carnegie Mellon and Martin Marietta) to control a driverless vehicle up to 30km/h.

In 1994, the twin robot vehicles VaMP and Vita-2 of Daimler-Benz and Ernst Dickmanns
of UniBwM drove more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris three-lane
highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h, albeit
semi-autonomously with human interventions. They demonstrated
autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, and lane changes left
and right with autonomous passing of other cars.

In 1995, Dickmanns´ re-engineered autonomous S-Class Mercedes-Benz took a 1600 km trip from Munich in Bavaria to Copenhagen in Denmark and back, using saccadic computer vision and transputers to react in real time. The robot achieved speeds exceeding 175 km/h on the German Autobahn,
with a mean time between human interventions of 9km, or 95% autonomous
driving. Again it drove in traffic, executing manoeuvres to pass other
cars. Despite being a research system without emphasis on long distance
reliability, it drove up to 158 km without human intervention.

In 1995, the Carnegie Mellon University
Navlab project achieved 98.2% autonomous driving on a 5000 km
(3000-mile) "No hands across America" trip. This car, however, was
semi-autonomous by nature: it used neural networks to control the
steering wheel, but throttle and brakes were human-controlled.

From 1996-2001, the Italian government funded the ARGO Project at University of Parma and Pavia University (coordinated by Prof. Alberto Broggi), which worked on enabling a modified Lancia Thema
to follow the normal (painted) lane marks in an unmodified highway. The
culmination of the project was a journey of 2,000 km over six days on
the motorways of northern Italy dubbed MilleMiglia in Automatico,
with an average speed of 90 km/h. 94% of the time the car was in fully
automatic mode, with the longest automatic stretch being 54 km. The
vehicle had only two black-and-white low-cost video cameras on board, and used stereoscopic vision
algorithms to understand its environment, as opposed to the "laser,
radar - whatever you need" approach taken by other efforts in the field.

Three US Government funded military efforts known as Demo I (US Army), Demo II (DARPA), and Demo III (US Army). Demo III (2001)^[1]
demonstrated the ability of unmanned ground vehicles to navigate miles
of difficult off-road terrain, avoiding obstacles such as rocks and
trees. James Albus at NIST provided the Real-Time Control System which is a hierarchical control system.
Not only were individual vehicles controlled (e.g. throttle, steering,
and brake), but groups of vehicles had their movements automatically
coordinated in response to high level goals.

In 2002, the DARPA Grand Challenge
competitions were announced. The competitions allowed international
teams to compete in fully autonomous vehicle races over rough unpaved
terrain and in a non-populated suburban setting.

More info on issues below could be obtained from Wikipedia.

• 3 Recent projects
  • 3.1 Fully autonomous
    • 3.1.1 Vehicles for paved roads
    • 3.1.2 Free-ranging military vehicles
  • 3.2 Pre-built infrastructure
    • 3.2.1 Dual mode transit - monorail
    • 3.2.2 Automated highway systems
    • 3.2.3 Free-ranging on grid
  • 3.3 Driver-assistance
    • 3.3.1 Sensorial-informative
    • 3.3.2 Actuation-corrective
    • 3.3.3 Systemic
• 4 Existing and missing technologies
  • 4.1 Sensors
  • 4.2 Navigation
  • 4.3 Motion Planning
  • 4.4 Control of vehicle
  • 4.5 Work done in simulation
• 5 Social issues
  • 5.1 Motivations
  • 5.2 Social Costs
• 6 Discussion & Future
• 7 Key players
  • 7.1 International
  • 7.2 Governments
  • 7.3 Universities and professional bodies
  • 7.4 Commercial interests
  • 7.5 Voluntary and hobbyist groups

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Google: ‘driverless car’ under Google Image

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What do you think? Feel free to drop your opinion(s) or comment(s).

"Oops, I plagiarized Wikipedia"

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