Driverless cars yield to reality: It's a long road ahead

Take a drive on Highway 101 between Silicon Valley and San Francisco these days and you might see one of Google's driverless cars in the lane next to you. The vehicles are one of the most visible signs of the increasing amount of research going on in the area related to automated driving technology.

To people like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and head of the Google X division that is researching the cars, the technology holds the potential to transform urban centers, reduce the amount of land given over to parking lots and cut down on accidents.

Cars will be able to drop people off at work in pleasant green spaces and drive themselves away to distant parking lots, where they'll park efficiently in compact spaces, Brin said last September. He predicted widespread use of autonomous vehicles could come as soon as 2018.