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Wheego

Baidu

It appears the roads of California are about to get even more crowded with self-driving cars. The Wall Street Journal reports that Valeo (a tier-one supplier to the auto industry) and Wheego (an electric vehicle powertrain engineering company) have each been granted permits by the state's DMV to begin testing a single autonomous vehicle on public roads. And over at electrek, there are some grainy spy shots of Google's new fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans, the first fruits of Google's partnership with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

By being one of the first states in the nation to allow for the testing of autonomous vehicles on its roads, California has become quite the hotbed for self-driving car research. The addition of Wheego and Valeo now brings the total number of testing permits issued up to 17. At the end of the summer, Chinese tech firm Baidu gained permission to begin testing autonomous vehicles in the state as well.

Those tests appear to be going quite well as of late. As part of the conditions of being granted an autonomous vehicle testing permit, each company must report any accidents to the DMV along with a report of what happened. In the past two years, only 19 such incidents have occurred, the most recent happening at the beginning of September 2016 when a Google test vehicle was rear-ended by a human driver.

California isn't the only state in the country to allow for autonomous vehicle testing, however. Pittsburgh is the home of Uber's Advanced Technology Center, and the ride-sharing company has even begun using self-driving vehicles to ferry customers around. According to Quartz, that process has not been entirely problem-free. The news outlet has reported a few minor accidents and at least one case of an Uber test vehicle driving the wrong way up a one-way street.

On Monday, HERE (the mapping company now owned by Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz) and the Iowa Department of Transportation announced their own project to develop an autonomous vehicle and freight movement corridor on I-380 between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids.

Outside of these areas, the rest of us will probably have to wait another few years before we get to ride in driverless vehicles. 2021 has been set as a target for autonomous ride-sharing cars by a number of companies, including Ford and BMW.

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