 self-driving cars, piloted cars, driverless cars, automated cars, call them whatever you want. we've been hearing about the technology for a long time. if you're near Google headquarters in California you've probably even seen a few self-driving cars putting around. it's going to be years and years and years until we can actually buy this stuff, right? not necessarily. dynamic cruise control has been around a long time, since like the 90s. started on just a few like super premium models. now you can get on all sorts of cars. dynamic cruise just makes sure that you stay the same distance behind the car in front of you. so the car in front of you brakes, you slow down, it speeds up, you speed up. you can touch the gas pedal. it's really cool. current cars can also do something called lane keep, which basically uses cameras on the windshield to make sure that you stay in your lane. you start to drift, you either get a warning, some cars will even steer back into the lane so you don't have to touch the wheel. next year's Tesla's will be able to pick you up in front of your house on a schedule of your choosing. in 2017, Cadillac is gonna offer something called super cruise, which is basically the same thing that Tesla is doing next year. it's just going to take control of the car for you. you won't have to do hardly anything. before too long we'll have highways filled with cars that are chatting amongst themselves, keeping a safe distance and maximizing speed. so what happens when cars don't need us at all? becomes more of a legal question. like who's going to be liable? if your car crashes, who's to blame? is it you? is it the car company? who knows? we got to figure that out. but if we do, then it becomes an open field. anything's possible. Google's latest self-driving cars, the little two-seaters that they built themselves, you know the ones that kind of look like emoji, don't even have steering wheels and you'll be able to summon them with a smartphone app. Uber has already said that someday they're going to just replace all their cars with self-driving cars. they won't have drivers. in the future do cars even need to look like cars? maybe not. maybe they're just dark compartments where you can get a few more minutes of sleep before you get to work. shipping trucks could just be giant rolling warehouses for those packages too big to drop off by delivery day. why do they need to be a certain size? they can just be miles long because they're controlled by computer. the expressway becomes a super expressway. a never-ending pipeline of cabins and containers traveling at speeds impossible by today's standards. so once we nail this self-driving part, cars really don't need to look like cars at all.