Would you believe it's been nearly 90 years since we first started hearing about driverless, or autonomous, vehicles? That's right, it wasn't too long after the automobile debuted in the 1880s that the Achen Motor Company drove a "phantom automobile" through the streets of Milwaukee on Dec. 8, 1926. That was basically the first remote-controlled car—it just happened to be life-sized.
The first self-sufficient driverless cars debuted in the 1980s when Carnegie Mellon and Mercedes-Benz teamed to launch what were described as "robot-cars." Today, headlines about driver-less cars are about as common as Honda Accords.
