A brief history of the self-driving car


1490s

Leonardo da Vinci thought up the concept of lidar before anyone else in c. 1498. Although neither he, nor anybody else, knew what a laser was, a sensor, or a car, da Vinci drew up plans that would eventually make up the original patent for Parodyne’s lidar technology. A corner of the page with crucial information on how to make the lidar work, however, is missing, hence why Parodyne’s sensors are still non-functional. Parodyne has thus far managed to avoid any patent infringement lawsuits on account of patents not existing yet in the 1400s, as well as da Vinci and his legal team being dead for quite some time now.

1940s

During the Allied invasion of Germany, it was discovered that Nazi scientists had been working on self-driving technology for the majority of the war. The aim was to reduce the amount of food and methamphetamine required for their troops, putting less strain on their supply lines. Most of the technology was destroyed as the Nazis fled, but several dozen scientists working on the tech were granted asylum in the US as part of Operation Paperclip and were assigned to build, among other things, machines that screw the caps onto toothpaste tubes. Charlie Bucket’s father would later go on to repair such machines after losing his job to automation.

1950s

The middle of the 20th century saw the invention of many groundbreaking automotive technologies, one of which being the orange traffic cone. All traffic cones were manufactured in 1952 in Flint, Michigan and no other cones have been made since then. The remarkable usefulness of orange cones as well as artificial scarcity made for a burgeoning second-hand market. Interest in cones dwindled steadily until the 1980s, when the general public came to the realization that cones are relatively easy to steal. This is believed to be a major contributing factor to the downfall of the Detroit motoring industry. Traffic researchers at Stanford University had identified a suspicious correlation between traffic cone interest and cocaine use, but this was later ignored when an even stronger correlation was discovered between cocaine use and years beginning in 198.

There was a short-lived hype around tall traffic cones in particular around 2010 after the release of the straight-to-Netflix zinger The Parking Lot Movie, in which several of the main characters play a game called “Flip Cone”. The characters in the movie however insist that the cones were borrowed, not stolen.

With the advent of self-driving cars - more specifically, self-driving car testing - traffic cones have skyrocketed in price on the used market, sometimes fetching prices north of $4,000 for pristine examples. Placing a traffic cone on the hood of a self-driving car is used today in many autonomy stacks as a safety mechanism to prevent unwanted longitudinal movement of the vehicle.

1960s

When the CIA began experimenting with mind control technologies under the project codename MK Ultra, one of the more promising ideas was to have the subject wear a helmet fitted with sensors and a computer that would “drive” them autonomously. The helmet idea was plagued with issues however, many of which caused the wearer to run into other people and stop randomly. A significant number of subjects developed an irrational fear of traffic cones.

After the CIA steered its mind control efforts away from sensor-ladened helmets in favor of LSD, they poached Stanford post-doc Arlo Johnson to lead up their now estranged self-driving division, dubbed Project Collywobbles. Dogs were used as test subjects rather than humans. According to former CIA director Russell Iskra, “Humans are much better test subjects for LSD because they have really crazy stories and stuff. Dogs just don’t.”

The program was scuttled entirely when it was discovered that verbal commands such as “sit” and “come here boy” are much more effective at controlling dogs’ behavior than computers are.

1970s

The United States was plagued with rising gas prices, the Silicon Valley startup had just been invented, and the ever-unfolding Watergate scandal was hijacking every American’s attention. After the shuttering of the secret government Project Collywobbles, Arlo Johnson assembled a crackerjack team of computer scientists from Stanford and the Allegheny County Community College to build autonomous vehicles, calling the company Autovan. Despite a positive outlook on the company from tech heavy-hitters such as IBM, the company folded in 1973. According to Johnson, prohibitively expensive sensors and relatively unsophisticated computer technology were to blame.

Among many other things, L. Ron Hubbard credits himself with having invented the self-driving car. If this is actually true, it is likely to have occurred during his time living in the California desert after his unsuccessful attempt to take over the town of Clearwater, Florida. He reportedly assembled a small team of electrical engineers in a small town built for himself and high-ranking officers of the Church of Scientology. Three decades later, this small town would be used as the venue for the 2008 DARPA Urban Challenge.

1980s

Nothing important happened in the 1980s apart from the introduction of New Coke and the time Dee Snider absolutely obliterated the PMRC in his testimony to congress about “satanic song lyrics”.

1990s

America’s obsession in the 1990s with products that have “never been touched by human hands!” led to a fad whereby drivers of brand new vehicles would not hold the steering wheel, and would instead “hover” their hands near it. This behavior came back in vogue during the summer of 2017 during the ramp-up of self-driving tech hype. Vehicle operators could be seen in news articles pertaining to automotive tech hovering their hands near the steering wheel, presumably to appeal to 1990’s nostalgia-obsessed millennials.

This was also a period of time in which technology hadn’t quite caught up to all the interesting ideas college students were thinking up. One of the major bottlenecks in autonomous vehicle development was the fact that they were limited in their development ability by the availability of AOL CD roms.

2000s

In 2003, Nick Bostrom of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University published a groundbreaking paper titled Are you living in a simulation?, in which he, of course, concludes that humanity is most likely living in a simulation of itself. Reddit philosophers were quick to point out that the paper fails to specify what we are living in a simulation of. Following the harsh criticism, robotics researchers figured out that we are most likely to be assets in an autonomous vehicle simulation and AVs spotted on public roads are simply the ego vehicles in these simulations. Further thought experiments by Oxford University professors concluded that because far more autonomous miles are achieved in simulation than in real-life testing, it is likely that real autonomous vehicles have only achieved somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen or so miles on real public roads.

Following the questionable success of the DARPA Grand and Urban challenges, competing teams went off to form many of the infamous ‘big player’ autonomous vehicle companies we know of today, rather than working for DARPA. This collection of founders later became known as the Self-Driving Car Mafia, or the “Autonomafia” - universally agreed to be an awful name.

Having a magpie-like attraction to economically dubious business ventures, Donald Trump saw the business opportunity in self-driving technology. In 2006 The Trump Organization formed a subsidiary called Trump Cars. The plan for the business was to simply buy a competing self-driving car startup and then re-brand the company. Trump Cars ultimately failed to acquire any competing companies in the industry and were forced to pivot their business strategy, thusly re-branding to Trump Steaks.

2010s

Of all the technologies tracked on the Gartner Hype Cycle, Autonomous vehicle tech is said to be the only one to have traveled in both directions of the X-axis. Due to the fact that the technology hadn’t quite been worked out before go-to-market strategies began to emerge, autonomous vehicle technology is said to have started at the trough of disillusionment, then traveled backwards up to the peak of inflated expectations, then back down to the trough, where it has remained ever since. Some more visionary industry leaders have expressed interest in one day ascending to the slope of enlightenment, but this could only be achieved by hiring experts in business development, which would cost far too much of that sweet, sweet investor money.

As autonomous vehicles started to pick up steam in 2016, the Boy Scouts of America filed a lawsuit against the entire rest of the AV industry for allegedly stealing the idea of making a car drive by itself. The case was initially shot down by the judge overseeing the case on the basis that “You cannot sue an entire industry. You need to pick someone”, marking yet another failed lawsuit filed by the organisation. After two appeals, the Boy Scouts of America settled out of court with several companies for an undisclosed amount of money. The settlement is thought to be insignificant though, as the organization was only able to prove the theft of several orange cones from an annual Scout-o-rama event in Tucson, Arizona.

In 2018, several members of the former Autonomafia organized the first - and last - Autonomous Bowling League. The idea was simple: Disable the vehicle’s perception subsystem, then send the car into a formation of pedestrian dummies. Due to the extortionate cost of test dummies, the idea of replacing them with cones was floated around, but this idea was quickly extinguished by corporate bean-counters who were having enough trouble sourcing reasonably priced traffic cones on eBay. The league was shut down after two years due to excessive alcohol consumption at events. According to contestants, “We’re technically not driving the cars, so what’s the issue?” Fans of the sport activity started their own league with manually-driven cars, but this quickly devolved into classic drunk-driving, which is illegal.

By 2017, the Arizona Department of Transportation had received over 9,000 formal complaints filed by Phoenix residents over the concerns of competing self-driving companies operating in the area. The majority of the complaints had to do with distrust of the technology and safety on the roads. There was the occasional complaint accusing work vehicles and people with ski racks on their cars for being newcomer AV companies in stealth mode, which tended to strip credit away from the outspoken NIMBYs. Concern started to heat up in the summer as road users began seeing entire armadas of AVs beefin’ over turf on the streets of Chandler, resulting in what became known as the Operational Design Domain Wars. Hoping to prevent the conflict from turning into an all-out gang war, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office illegally instated a policy which would allow deputies to demand to see a self-driving car’s green card and two forms of identification. If the car could not produce its documents, it would be impounded and eventually sold at auction alongside things like murder weapons and meth lab equipment for far less than it was worth. The first of such auctions attracted graduate students and robotics professors from all over the country hoping to get their hands on a used self-driving car. To the students’ disappointment, the cars that they wound up buying had no exciting modifications other than false floors for hiding drugs and illegal immigrants, and were eventually sold to an anonymous state senator.

2020s

In 2020, Silicon Valley startups enjoyed an unexpected wake of prosperity brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. More people buying stupid crap online, a decreased need for office space, and massive layoffs to their bloated workforces meant that industry executives could rake in higher bonuses and acquire private islands for when the shit hits the fan. The seemingly endless waves of layoffs meant that tech workers started seeking high-paying remote jobs on LinkedIn. Mired with upper management revenge porn and self-indulgent posts by “industry expert” grifters who have no verifiable experience, LinkedIn struggled to maintain the attention of these new job-seekers. They soon migrated to TikTok where they were welcomed by more meaningful industry discourse.

In February of 2023, “Layoff Challenge” swept through TikTok by storm. The idea was that tech workers would try to work at - and get laid off from - three autonomous vehicle startups. Success was measured by whether or not the laid-off worker was able to get another job in the industry ever again. The trend made national headlines however when teenagers took the challenge too seriously and began gaslighting their parents into quitting their jobs to work at sub-50-employee tech startups.

In mid-2023, tech reporters started to become wise to the fact that the business plans of increasingly more new automotive tech startups simply involved building trains. “The idea is that instead of relying on squishy humans to drive a semi-truck with lots of things in it from place to place, we will eventually have computers drive those trucks, then get them to play follow-the-leader. They will even be able to take turns being the leader if they want” says AutoTrain CTO Norman Fritz. “Then you just need one of the trucks to do the decision making and get the other ones to follow behind it autonomously.” Investments have all but dried up for AV companies taking this approach due to the lack of key highway infrastructure running parallel to America’s major train lines.