Blind faith: Elon Musk, other visionaries have been promoting driverless car - it never arrives

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Elon Musk, who had claimed that driverless cars would arrive this year, just got pulled over by federal regulators. Officials from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that safety features in Tesla Inc.'s Autopilot system didn't work as designed and nudged the automaker to recall all its vehicles to address the issue.

It's debatable whether Tesla and Chief Executive Officer Musk can fix the problem, which has more to do with human drivers putting too much faith in the technology. You can't blame them, really. Visionaries like Musk have been promoting the idea of a driverless car for almost a hundred years. And yet, it never arrives.

There's some dispute as to when the idea of the driverless car first originated. The first experiments began when inventors realized they could use radio signals to control vehicles from a distance. After several attempts in the early 20th century, a radio engineer named Francis Houdina attracted considerable attention for his remote-controlled cars.

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In a typical demonstration of what he dubbed his “phantom control,” Houdina guided a car as it threaded its way down New York's Fifth Avenue. Pedestrians gaped at the sight of a driverless car. As the New York Times reported, the vehicle “zigzagged through the heavy traffic of the avenue,” moving “as if a phantom hand were at the wheel.”

But it was not a steady hand. The car barely missed a horse-drawn milk wagon, several trucks and automobiles, and a fire truck – and that was before it collided with a car containing journalists filming the exhibition. Houdina finally jumped behind the wheel after the car almost went through the windows of a candy store.

Houdina's “phantom” car was