History

History of Autonomous Cars

In GM’s 1939 exhibit, Norman Bel Geddes created the first self-driving car, which was an electric vehicle guided by radio-controlled electromagnetic fields generated with magnetized metal spikes embedded in the roadway. By 1958, General Motors had made this concept a reality. The car’s front end was embedded with sensors called pick-up coils that could detect the current flowing through a wire embedded in the road. The current could be manipulated to tell the vehicle to move the steering wheel left or right.

In 1977, the Japanese improved upon this idea, using a camera system that relayed data to a computer to process images of the road. However, this vehicle could only travel at speeds below 20 mph. Improvement came from the Germans a decade later in the form of the VaMoRs, a vehicle outfitted with cameras that could drive itself safely at 56 mph. As technology improved, so did self-driving vehicles’ ability to detect and react to their environment.

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