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A company wants to turn your existing car into a self-driving vehicle. All it takes is $10,000 of rooftop sensors and actuators. No, we're not about Google or GM, but a small San Francisco startup named Cruise. Even more surprisingly, the company hopes to bring its first units to market early next year, according to Forbes.

The way it works is that sensors placed on the roof gather data, which is then analyzed by a computer tucked away in the trunk of your vehicle. The press of a button on the dash turns the system on or off. But Cruise's vision is more akin to GM's Super Cruise technology than Google's fully autonomous creation. This means the system, known as the RP-1, will be able to control and navigate the car to a degree with adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping assist, but you're not going to want to read a book behind the wheel quite yet.

For now, the system is outfitted for only the Audi A4 and S4, but the company promises more models on the way.

Despite its currently untested potential, the idea that a startup could achieve a semi-autonomous system quicker than a major U.S. car manufacturer is a hard concept to wrap your head around. Forbes attributes the company's early success with the "Lean Startup" approach, where you build quickly, learn from your mistakes, and improve—all without spending tons of money.

Although Cruise's progress is admirable, it still has plenty of hurdles to overcome. For one, the cost is a little high for what you end up getting, which is essentially a super-charged cruise control, and the system only works optimally on roads surrounding Cruise's HQ in San Francisco. Scaling up to more locales will probably take much more time. But the promise is there.

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