A writer for Electronic Design magazine named Lou Frenzel opines “that the driverless car is not a good idea.” His argument comes down to, “I don’t know anything about it, but I can think of lots of problems that I don’t imagine anyone at Google has ever thought of.”

For example, he asks, can self-driving cars operate at night? Can they handle rain, fog, and snow? Can they find a parking space in a garage? Can they make left turns?

The fact that all of these questions have been asked and answered by Google, Volkswagen, and other companies developing self-driving cars makes Frenzel’s article pretty insipid. For example, most of these cars rely on radar, infrared, and/or laser beams, none of which care whether it is day or night. Infrared can also “penetrate smoke,rain, snow, blowing sand, and most foggy conditions,” though in heavy fog, a self-driving car would slow down, just as a human-driven car should do.

We’ve already seen cars that can navigate parking garages and park there. Google’s cars have no problem turning left “across five lanes of traffic.”

There’s nothing wrong with asking questions like these. But it is particularly ironic that a writer for an electronics magazine starts out with the conclusion that self-driving cars are bad without even trying to find the easily available answers to his questions.

The good news is that self-driving car technology is advancing as fast as proponents have predicted. The latest car to enter the market is the Volvo XC90, which has a “Pilot Assist” mode that is the next step beyond adaptive cruise control. In this mode, the car not only mimics the speed of the car in front, it mimics the steering, allowing the car’s driver to go hands-free for as long as they are willing to follow the car in front.

The only drawback is that Volvo has programmed the mode to only work at speeds under 30 mph, so it’s great in traffic but not so good on the open road. This limit is probably due to liability concerns: auto makers know they can make cars safely stop before hitting anything at speeds up to 30 mph, but don’t want to get sued if the car in front comes to an abrupt stop from, say, 70 mph. Still, it is a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, a company called Cruise Automation says that it can convert any car to become a self-driving car, at least on highways. The $10,000 package includes radar, optical sensors, and processors to allow the car to navigate a highway lane, avoiding other cars and obstacles. The company says it is working on cars that can drive city streets or pass slower vehicles on the highway by departing the lane the car is in.

Last year, Cruise said that it would soon have a self-driving car package for certain models of Audis. Now it is saying it can add adaptive cruise control, collision avoidance, and lane tracking to any car (though I suspect they mean any late-model car). The point is that, as new self-driving technologies are perfected, companies like Cruise will make them available for existing cars, thus allowing the self-driving car revolution to take place that much faster.