Truly autonomous vehicles won't arrive until at least 2020 and likely later, according to a panel of car company executives and researchers that spoke to Congress this week. Mike Robinson, vice president of sustainability and global regulatory affairs at General Motors, told a panel in the House of Representatives that vehicles capable of taking you to a destination with no oversight from a human driver "are a significant distance into the future," the Detroit News reported.

Raj Rajkumar, who is in charge of the driverless car research project at Carnegie Mellon University, echoed Robinson's sentiments, saying an autonomous vehicle likely would not arrive until "sometime in the 2020s," according to the News. Only Nissan was slightly more optimistic, with an executive there saying CEO Carlos Ghosn has committed to selling a driverless car by 2020. Not speaking at the panel: Google, whose self-driving car has recorded more than half a million miles on the road to date. The panel's chairman, Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI), encouraged car companies to move quickly: "These vehicles have the potential to offer incredible safety and mobility benefits to drivers and fundamentally transform transportation infrastructure as we know it," he said in prepared remarks.