God, I love living in the future. Don’t you? Four self-driven electric vans arrived in Shanghai yesterday after a 13,000km ‘test drive’ from Italy. They had no maps, no driver, and they stopped to pick up a hitchhiker on the way.

Think about it: what’s awesome about road trips? Road food. Road music. Road company. Road scenery. Another road thing that isn’t publishable on a family-friendly website. Everything, in fact, except having to take hours-long shifts driving. And now cars can do that for you! Or I mean, they will.

And this wasn’t any soft-shoed let’s-drive-to-church-on-a-Sunday robot road trip; these cars went from Moscow traffic jams to the outskirts of Siberia; the vans used an artificial vision system to automatically adjust the vehicles’ speed and direction for given conditions. Says Alberto Broggi, lead researcher for the project,

“The idea here was to travel on a long route, on two different continents, in different states, different weather, different traffic conditions, different infrastructure. Then we can have some huge number of situations to test the system on,”

Cars that drive themselves without turning into giant CGI robots. That, my friends, is having your cake and eating it too. Except it’s a robot cake that eats itself for you.

[yahoo.news]