Driverless Cars On Sale Within Decade: GM

Cars that will drive and park themselves will be on the market in 10 years, GM executives say. It hasn't been perfected, but the technology to create a "driverless" car exists, and the company hopes to use it to drastically increase the safety and efficiency of travel. "This is not science fiction," a GM exec tells the AP.

Inter-car antennae would allow vehicles on a highway to more tightly configure themselves to optimize traffic by communicating road conditions and the position of other cars to each other, among other enormous potential leaps. Concerns persist about government regulation, personal privacy, and technical reliability, but "it will really change society, very much like the transition from a horse to a car," said one Stanford researcher. (More General Motors stories.)