sdv - Timeline

Bel Geddes argued in his book, Magic Motorways, that humans should be removed from the process of driving in 1940

In 1953, RCA Labs successfully built a miniature car that was guided and controlled by wires that were laid in a pattern on a laboratory floor

In 1957, a full size system was successfully demonstrated by RCA Labs

In the 1980s, a vision-guided Mercedes-Benz robotic van achieved a speed of 39 miles per hour (63 km/h) on streets without traffic.

n 1995, Carnegie Mellon University's Navlab project completed a 3,100 miles (5,000 km) cross-country journey, of which 98.2% was autonomously controlled.

Demonstration System

During the 1960s and the 1970s, Bendix Corporation developed and tested driverless cars that were powered and controlled by buried cables