It?s easy to think that driverless cars or Tesla?s lane-changing advances are inventions of the very recent past. But as Arizona State University historian Jameson Wetmore explains, people have been dreaming about self-driving cars for a very long time. ?At every point in the past 50 years, someone mentioned that autonomous vehicles were just 20 years in our future,? said Wetmore. ?That?s what they said in the ?60s, the ?80s, and the late ?90s. For the first time in history, driverless cars are not 20 years in the future?they?re much closer than that.?

There are two reasons why self-driving cars are inching closer to realization. For one, there?s the massive impetus provided by entities outside the car industry. Wetmore points to organizations like Google, which ?didn?t necessarily have the background to be as terrified of autonomous vehicles as the traditional car industry.? In addition, consumer attitudes about cars also have changed in recent years, and the latest generations of teenagers aren?t as excited about driving as previous generations. A 2011 study from the University of Michigan?s Transportation Research Institute reported that less than a third of U.S. sixteen-year-olds have driver?s licenses. At this point, it?s very likely that self-driving cars will become an important piece of the transportation puzzle, at least in population centers, but that leads to some new questions. For instance, how will we transition from human drivers to cars that drive themselv...