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The U.S. Congress, for example, voted in 2001 for a plan that would make a third of all military “operational ground combat vehicles” driverless by 2015. That is just not going to happen.

“At some point in time maybe there’s a driverless car,” Jon Lauckner, General Motors’ chief technology officer, told the Intelligent Transportation Society World Congress in Detroit this week. “But that point in time is into the future a good distance.”

Still, the robocar field is already thick with competitors and prototypes.

GM announced this week that a semi-autonomous system for highways called Super Cruise will be available on a Cadillac model available in 2016. Although it will still require a driver by law, the car will be able to steer, communicate with other cars, keep the car a safe distance away, in the middle of the lane, slowing down and speeding up as traffic dictates.

Honda also revealed its automated driving systems on a 12 km highway loop in Detroit, and also an automated lane change system that uses both vehicle-to-vehicle and cloud communications. Other carmakers have automated systems that work at lower speeds, including the widely available parallel parking feature. Highways in California are being equipped with the infrastructure to allow vast convoys of driverless cars.

These are not quite autonomous cars, more like next generation cruise control. GM said it is also working on a system to tell if human drivers are still paying attention, which seems to reflect the inevitable suspicion that, given the opportunity, they will not be.