Tesla CTO JB Straubel isn’t without obvious bias, but he believes autonomous cars are inevitable and upon us. As he points out, auto-pilot isn’t new, just new to the highways. From Katie Fehrenbacher at Gigaom:

“Tesla has been investing a quite of bit of time into the technology and has been hiring ‘a large team,’ said Straubel. Tesla has long maintained that it is trying to push the envelope of car technology, beyond just electrifying vehicles. The company has built bleeding edge tech features into its second-gen car the Model S like voice recognition, large in vehicle dashboards, and remote over-the-air software updates.

While this type of autonomous vehicle technology might seem futuristic, it’s actually widely used in all other vehicles, said Straubel. The auto industry has just been particularly slow moving to adopt it. Vehicles like planes, ships, and space ships all use auto pilot for safety reasons, and Straubel said ‘They didn’t do it because the pilot was bored; they did it because of safety.'”