Sputnik... An autonomous car fitted with radar, cameras and laser sensors drove itself 99% of the time during a recent 3,400-mile trip from San Francisco to New York never once exceeding the speed limit on the 15-state journey. The person sitting in the driver seat of the Audi Q5 outfitted by auto supplier Delphi Corp. intervened once when traffic was weaving around in a construction zone, and again when the car did not want to move into a busy left lane to avoid police stopped on the right shoulder.
While navigating bridges, traffic circles and open highways, the car collected nearly three terabytes of data roughly equivalent to 30 percent of all of the printed material in the Library of Congress which engineers can use to further enhance autonomous driving systems.