Automated Vehicle Symposium - San Francisco 

I attended the AUVSI (Assoc. of Unmanned Vehicle Systems, International) auto symposium in San Francisco yesterday and came away with the very clear, and rather startling realization that driverless vehicles will be with us in the very near future, and that the auto industry is paying very close attention and working diligently to be certain that Google doesn't become General Motors.

Presentations were made by Volvo, which is committed to attaining zero fatalities by 2020, by General Motors explaining their incremental ramp up to autonomous vehicles, and a presentation by Chris Urmson, the director of self driving cars at Google.  The Google presentation was truly staggering in the scope of its research and implementation.  It seems that one of their biggest problems is that they are allowing their employees to use and test the cars.  Once the test period is over they want to arm wrestle to see who gets to keep the car.  They love them.  The video below has had over 7 million views in a month and a half !

What was very interesting in a different way, was that Ginger Goodin, from Texas A&M transportation Institute spoke about how Texas was looking at the rules and regulations that are going to be necessary to integrate this technology in their state, and while my state of California is not exactly sitting on it's hands with this technology, I was very surprised that no one attended who was representing the State of  California   (at least as far as I know) .

It's equally interesting that this game changing technology, to which every American will soon be exposed, is moving forward so rapidly while the commercial  use of drones in our airspace, an equally game changing  technology, is being hamstrung by the FAA.