The race to develop driverless vehicles is zooming full-speed ahead, engaging all the major car companies—as well as Google X, Apple, and various start-ups. Though schemes for self-driving date back to the 1920s, with resurgences in the ’50s and ’80s, this once-farfetched pursuit is attaining real-world feasibility. Google X, a leading player now known as X, has logged over 1.7 million miles in its autonomous test cars on public roads. States including California, Florida, and Michigan have enacted legislation to permit such trials. Although a recent fatal accident with a Tesla test car drew widespread attention, it was statistically an extremely rare self-driving event. In fact, the day when a phantom chauffeur will charge an electric vehicle on its own, analyze the route, exchange up-to-the-moment information with other cars on the road, and pick you up for work—or your kids for school—is no longer sci-fi fantasy. Many of the manufacturers expect fully autonomous vehicles (AVs), requiring no human supervision or backup drivers, to hit the market around 2020—letting you sleep, read, work, or entertain guests as an unmanned sedan ferries you door to door.

Meanwhile, questions are emerging about how AVs could change the form and structure of cities, towns, and roadways. Much of the research—at venues including MIT, IIT, and Carnegie Mellon University—has examined this autonomy in tandem with other evolving trends and technologies. Exploiting the joint potential, self-driving seems a natural fit with electric powering; hyperconnectivity; sharing models (as in Zipcars, urban bike fleets, and cyber-facilitated car pools); and operative algorithms, akin to the dispatch programs that optimize elevator service based on passenger destinations.