Matt Novak:
In 1991 Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which authorized $650 million to be spent over the course of the next six years on developing the technology that would be needed for driverless cars running on an automated highway. The vision was admittedly bold, seeing as how primitive all of the components needed for such a system were at that time. Even consumer GPS technology — which today we take for granted in our phones and vehicles — wasn’t a reality in the early 1990s.