Car trends 2024 – driverless tech has stalled and failed spectacularly

What do you remember from 2016? Brexit? David Bowie passing away? But if you are a car person and a technologist, you'll recall two particular things from 2016: Tesla and Ford’s promise of fully autonomous, driverless cars.

In 2016, Elon Musk proclaimed that autonomous level 5 Teslas were only 'a year or so away'. Like many things that Musk says, it shocked the legacy car industry. And in response, Ford said it would have driverless cars on the road by 2021.

Autonomous cars are years late